Mercedes on contact between Hamilton with Gasly: 'Wasn't too bad'

Mercedes' season simply did not go as they had hoped. For the first time since 2011, the team finished the season without a win. Abu Dhabi, despite a podium, was not a top race either. Rosie Wait, the team's head of race strategy, looks back on the race.

On lap 15 of the race, Hamilton and Gasly had contact. How much did that affect Hamilton's car? According to Wait, it wasn't too bad: "These things often look worse on television than they are in reality and in the data and undoubtedly it will have affected the balance and the performance of Lewis's car slightly, but it was never a consideration for us to pay the cost of a pit stop of fitting a new front wing versus just continuing with it." The team's biggest concerns lay elsewhere: "The biggest concern for us was structural, so, if it had degraded and started to become a structural concern then that might have been a safety issue and that might have forced us to change it. We were monitoring it very closely during the race but thankfully that never became an issue and he could just complete the race with the wing as it was."

Sick George Russell

What many fans noticed was how George Russell looked. He seemed a bit under the weather and was coughing a lot. "George is fine," said Wait. "It's been a really tough season and a particularly gruelling run in and quite a few of us are feeling fairly under the weather. However, unlike George most of us don’t have to sit in a Formula One car being subjected to the kind of forces that he experiences for 58 laps of the race. I suspect that was a very unpleasant and uncomfortable experience."

Focus on the W15

How is the mood at Mercedes going into the winter break? Getting P2 in the constructors' championship was very important for the team: "Ultimately the aim of all of us here is to win championships and we weren’t able to deliver that this year. However, given the performance we had and the challenges we faced P2 is a really good result. Now we can move on to putting all of our energies into going one better next year."