Mercedes: "The lights on Bottas' steering wheel are for the practice start only."

Robert Doornbos indicated at Ziggo Sport, that Mercedes might try something new by anticipating the start of the race and that Valtteri Bottas therefore almost made a false start. The Finn reacted to the lights on his dashboard instead of the lights on the grid. Mercedes, however, indicated in a video on the Youtube channel of the team that it was an error by Bottas. 

Andrew Shovelin, trackside engineer of Mercedes, explains the start of Bottas. "He practices his starts normally through the lights on his steering wheel during the weekend and to simulate the start with the lights, his lights also turn on on his steering wheel. So if the lights on his dashboard go out, he started during the simulations," Shovelin says.

No false start

"That's why he reacted at the real start. It distracted him." The images of the start clearly show that the Mercedes driver moves before the lights go out, for which in the end no penalty was given. "There's an automatic system that can measure when a car has gone off the grid spot".

"The car can be in a reasonably large area inside that place without the system noticing. Because Valtteri didn't move much, he was still within those limits. So the system didn't detect a false start, because he was still inside that spot. It did cause him to lose a lot of space, because everyone around him was already at speed," Shovelin concluded.