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Laurence Edmondson, F1 Editor
MEXICO CITY — After being disqualified from last weekend’s U.S. Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton is sure several drivers escaped a similar punishment simply because their cars weren’t checked by the FIA after the race.
Hamilton finished second on the road in Austin, Texas, but was disqualified for excessive wear to his car’s plank assembly, which is used by the FIA to measure ride height legality.
Hamilton said the wear measurement of the rear skid block on his car was just 0.05mm beyond the permitted 1mm of wear allowed after the race.
As per the FIA’s regulations, only four cars were checked for plank assembly wear postrace, with Hamilton’s Mercedes and Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari found to be in breach of the rule while Max Verstappen’s Red Bull and Lando Norris’ McLaren were deemed legal.
However, Hamilton is convinced that a number of the 16 cars that weren’t checked would also have been disqualified if the FIA had carried out the test on all cars.
“Firstly I’ve heard from several different sources that there were a lot of other cars that were also illegal and weren’t tested, so they get away with it,” Hamilton said.
“I’ve been racing here for 16 years and there’s been times that there’s been many other scenarios like this. Some people have gotten away with some things, and some people have just been unlucky they got tested.
“Ultimately, there needs to be some better structure to make sure it’s fair and even across the board.”
After the disqualification, Mercedes explained that a lack of setup time under F1’s sprint weekend format contributed to the error, which was then exacerbated by the bumpy nature of the circuit.
“We’ve never had that problem in Austin before, it’s just that we had a sprint race this time,” Hamilton added. “An easy fix for that one, [would be to] just approach the weekend differently where the car is not set from Friday morning [practice], especially at the bumpiest track we have been to.
“That’s really the only reason there’s failures, because it’s so bumpy. Some cars have better ride quality than others.
“If you look at the Ferrari [from onboard cameras], Charles’ head and my head, we have a pretty bad ride. It’s bumping around quite a lot because the cars are hitting the deck, it’s not because we are generally just pushing the car too low.”
Following the disqualifications in Austin there have been suggestions all cars should be checked for plank assembly wear after races, but world champion Verstappen, who won the race with a car that passed the test, believes that would take too long.
“Ah, but then you get the race result on Tuesday, I guess, when you have to check out every car,” he said. “The problem is that it’s just impossible to check everything, but I think the thought process from every team is that no one wants to be illegal.
“So no one sets up the car to be illegal. But then of course you have these random checks that get carried out. Sometimes it’s the top four, sometimes it’s in the middle of the field, the back. That’s just how it goes. You can’t check every car for every single part of the car.
“Otherwise we need 100 more people to do these kind of things. I think the only thing is when you check one car of the team and it’s illegal, then I think you should check the other one as well. That for me is the only thing. Otherwise you DQ one, and the other one moves up one position, when normally you always run quite similar setups.”
Hamilton hopes F1 and the FIA can continue to improve its processes so that results are not changed after the chequered flag.
“We are continuing to grow as a sport, great events, great races, and when people go home most often happy from the experience as something positive and then they hear of cars being disqualified or taken out, it’s just they might not fully understand the detail of it all and probably don’t care,” the seven-time champion added.
“Every time we take two steps forward we take at least a step back with something like that, so we’ve got to try and figure out how we move forward constantly as a sport.”