“It was a big crash we were seeing around 30G at points in his trip around the walls and the track,” Shovlin explained.
“Unfortunately the car’s not done quite so well so there’s a fair amount of damage to that we’ve managed to bring a lot of it back to the UK. We’ve got the power units at Brixworth where that’s being checked and inspected carefully, and we’ll just pick through this.
“Some of the bits we might be able to salvage but unfortunately quite a lot of it is beyond repair. We’re just looking at a logistics plan to try and be able to get sufficient parts to Portimao, which is the week after next, to make sure we can run both cars in the correct spec.”
Following the race, team principal Toto Wolff admitted that the crash could have a lasting impact on the team’s season. The budget cap introduced at the start of the year has pegged teams’s spending and eat into Mercedes’s planned upgrade budget.
“Our car is almost a write-off and in a cost-cap environment that is certainly not what we needed, and probably it’s going to limit upgrades that we’re able to do,” Wolff said after the Imola race.