Looking at his pace, looking at the gap to Carlos we are pretty confident he would have
been able to catch and pass on track.
Do we think we would have been able to fix George's damage in time had been able to the
car back?
Well, the first issue is he tried to get the car back, but he couldn’t and with it being
on three wheels, it's a long, long way to drive it around in that condition.
Next question: Could we have fixed it?
Well, we would have had a pretty good go, it would have needed a new floor, there was
damage to the bin deflector, there was a bit of bodywork damage but had he got it back
we would have certainly done everything to get him back in the race.
How is George?
Well, he is good, but the first thing was just he was relieved to see that Zhou was
okay after that accident.
You saw he jumped out of the car to run over to see if there was anything that he could
do to help.
When he got back to the pits, he was obviously frustrated that he couldn’t take part in
the race, he was desperate to take part in the British Grand Prix, to try and put on
a show for the British crowds and really that was the biggest disappointment.
But, he was pleased with the pace of the car over the weekend, he is excited that we've
got Austria just in a couple of days, so really he is looking forward to just getting back
in the car and try and get some more points on the board for the team.
How much difference did the new upgrades make?
The key thing for us here was seeing they actually performed as expected and they did
that.
They were delivering a few tenths more downforce to the car and we think that we saw that in
terms of the performance on the weekend.
The other thing that was nice to see was that there was a bit less bouncing, the car was
behaving a bit more normally, it was easier for the drivers to work with it, to tune the
balance.
So, overall, it was a pleasing result for us, not just to see Lewis on the podium but
to see that update kit perform as we hoped.
In retrospect, would we have chosen to put Lewis on the Medium tyre at the restart?
No, we would always still go for the Soft tyre and there is two reasons for that.
The Soft tyre is quicker until about lap 10.
So over the short race that we effectively had after the restart you are always going
to be better on the Soft.
But the other issue was that Lewis was struggling a bit on the warm-up and had he been on the
Medium tyre, that would have been just a bit more difficult.
So the Soft was definitely the right choice at that point.
The roar of the British crowd was indeed very loud and certainly as engineers we can hear
it on the pit wall, in the garage, even the drivers can hear it in the car and when you
consider that they've got earpieces that are pushed into their ears to try and shutout
the noise they are wearing a helmet, they got a thousand horsepower engine right behind
them, they can still hear that and that is one of the things that makes Silverstone so
special and we are really looking forward to next year when we get to go back there
again.
This is a good question and we've all been wondering, would Lewis have been able to win
the race without that safety car?
Looking at his pace, looking at the gap to Carlos we are pretty confident he would have
been able to catch and pass on track.
The bigger question is Charles was a bit further up the road and a little bit quicker car,
so whether he would have been able to catch him, we don’t know and the reality is we
would have to see that play out on track to know what the real answer is.
Lewis's pace was matching the Ferraris and indeed at times he was a little bit quicker
which was really encouraging to see.
But was this down to the fact that we could run the car down closer to the ground, was
it that track is a lot smoother at Silverstone or the updates?
Well, the reality in terms of how we were running the car, that was quite normal for
ride heights and everything.
But it is a smooth circuit and while we are working to make sure that our car works well
on bumpy tracks we still got a bit to do there.
So, no doubt the smooth track helped a bit towards that performance and then also yes,
the updates did play a part and that was encouraging to see because that's the bit that we will
carry into the next race, the race beyond but we need to build on this performance because
we know that we are not quite quick enough just yet.
Thank you very much for all of your questions we are going to be back after the Austrian
Grand Prix in one weeks’ time to answer some more.