A Red Bull and a Haas meet at the end of turn 4 in Silverstone, but Nico Hülkenberg doesn’t find it funny at all. When overtaking on lap four, Sergio Perez touched Hülkenberg’s front wing with his right rear wheel and snapped the left end plate. And with that, points for Hulkenberg are a long way off.
“The damage to the front wing and the early pit stop that followed cost a lot. That hit us hard [beeinträchtigt und] basically taken out of the race,” says Hülkenberg.
However, the German Formula 1 driver has a certain share in this development: Perez only comes within striking distance because Hülkenberg brakes at the front right before turn 3 and has to open up.
Then Hülkenberg pulls far to the right before turn 4 and opens up for Perez, who immediately pulls in and, in turn, lets himself be carried far out at the corner exit, right over Hülkenberg’s front wing.
Hulkenberg: scene with Perez “unhappy”
Perez pulls away immediately on the subsequent Wellington straight, and Hülkenberg has trouble staying on the line in turns six and seven. At the end of the old home stretch, a part of his front wing finally flies off on the left front, which Hülkenberg immediately reports on the radio.
His race engineer Gary Gannon replies: “Got it, we’re checking all the data.” Shortly afterwards he adds: “Yes, we see a big loss on the front axle. With this damage, the aerobalance has now slipped back by up to two percent.”
There is a short exchange on the radio, then Hulkenberg says: “Ok, I don’t think it makes much sense.” Then the decision to pit stop with a nose change is made. Hülkenberg makes this stop on lap eight and falls back to last place.
With that, the Haas driver explains, his race was over. Original sound: “Such a wing change costs you 15 seconds or so. It’s not so easy to make up for it. Or rather: It’s impossible to make up for it again. That was the end of the story.”
Hülkenberg describes the scene with Perez in turn 4 as “unhappy” and slightly reproaches the Red Bull driver: “He was probably a little too impatient because he had DRS and would have easily passed me after turn 6 anyway. It seemed rushed and unnecessary. But it is what it is now.”
And it wasn’t “great” the rest of the distance, Hulkenberg adds. The race was “boring” for him because he was on the road “on my own” until the safety car phase, no car in front and no one behind.
Hulkenberg: Tire wear “not the main issue”
He would have needed a safety car phase to catch up after the early stop, “but the safety car phase came too late for us,” says Hulkenberg. After that he was in a “classic DRS train” and at least overtook “a few cars”.
From the very back, Hülkenberg in the Haas VF-23 made it up to P13 and still had “a bit of fun,” he says. The pace was also “actually decent” in this phase on soft tires.
Has Haas been spared excessive tire wear this time? “I don’t think that was the problem today,” says Hulkenberg. “I think the tire wear was pretty low for everyone, even for us it wasn’t the main issue. The problem was actually the early damage to the front wing because we had to pit early.”
How his tactics would have worked with Hard in the first stint if the incident with Perez hadn’t happened, he doesn’t know, because Hard at the start was “not ideal”. “The tires didn’t work as well as expected and we thought the starting phase would be different,” says Hulkenberg.
Formula 1: Magnussen-Aus prepares worry lines
His Haas teammate Kevin Magnussen also unexpectedly retired shortly after halfway through the race: the Dane parked his smoking vehicle at the edge of the track at the entrance to the hangar straight. Diagnosis: Drive damage.
That’s worrying, says Hulkenberg. “I’ve had that a couple of times this year too. It’s definitely going to sound the alarm because it seems to be happening primarily with our team and with our car, so I think we need to take it seriously and find out why happens.”
The question remains what Hülkenberg calculates for the following Formula 1 race at the Hungaroring near Budapest in Hungary. His answer: It will be “very similar” to how it was last time at Silverstone. The German says nothing more about it.