On the eve of the Austrian grand Prix, Mercedes F1 chief Toto Wolff expressed his concern about the damage being caused by the new kerbs at Red Bull Ring which have caused a number high impact shunts during the course of the first two days of the race weekend.
“It is a concern. Yes there is some discussion happening. We discussed it during the session actually that we need to react quickly and trigger some reaction, but that is not an easy one.”
Wolff revealed that he had flagged his concerns about the kerbs with FIA race director Charlie Whiting.
“I don’t know what the FIA is going to decide, whether they are going to take those sausage kerbs away or whether they are going to modify some of the red kerbs, scratch them down, or fill them with concrete.”
“I don’t know but we’ve seen a couple of failures on various cars on various suspension designs and it’s still failing, I think there needs to be a reaction.”
With regards to Nico Rosberg’s incident, during the final half of FP3, Wolff said, “The strange thing is at the beginning it seemed that we had spikes of loads, but once we analysed it there was not much load on the suspension.”
“So it is some kind of strange frequency, oscillation on the tyre which makes the suspension break, we don’t know what it is. It looks like it’s the red kerbs that are new, which triggers that, so no answers here.”
After Rosberg’s crash, Mercedes strengthened the wishbones on both cars by wrapping them in extra carbon fibre layers.
Nevertheless, Rosberg is worried, “It’s a vibration. A very unusual, never-seen-before vibration which comes only on that shallow kerb. So that’s a worry because it’s not something that we’ve planned for building the car.”
“So not straightforward but they reinforced my car now in those fragile areas before qualifying,” added the German who qualified second but had to take a five place grid penalty as a result of the crash damage to his car.
Read the full story at GRAND PRIX 247
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