Written by Lujan Garcia, Edited by Gabriel Tsui
For 40 minutes, George Russell was the winner at Spa last Sunday. But the celebration and joy was short-lived, as post race inspection by FIA discovered that he was 1.5 kg underweight.
Russell was automatically disqualified and Lewis Hamilton went on to inherit the victory. To understand what happened, we must ask ourselves several questions.
First of all, what is underweight?
In the Formula 1 technical regulations manual, article 4.1 states that: “The mass of the car, without fuel, must not be less than 798 kilograms,(1,759 pounds) at all times during the competition”.
When they first weighed Russell's car with approximately 2.8 litres of fuel, it was weighed to be at the stipulated weight, but as the regulations state, the car must be weighted at more than 798 kilograms WITHOUT fuel.
You may also wonder, what happens when a racer is lighter than the stipulated weight (minimum of 80 kg including suit, helmet and shoes), as in the case of Yuki Tsunoda, who is the lightest racer in the competition.
In this case ballast is added to the car, which is a hard material such as granite, sand or iron, to complete the final weighing. Each team chooses in which part of the car to add it, depending on its strategy.
They can also be overweight, which would be a big disadvantage because it would make the driver go slower. But this usually does not happen since all racers follow a strict diet and exercise routine that makes them weigh less than the stipulated 80 kg.
One of the spectacular things that occurred during the race was Russell's one-stop strategy, electing to skip a scheduled second stop, surviving on the hard compound tires for an astonishing 32 laps.
But this has turned out to be an incredible disadvantage for Russell, as a set of four tires can lose up to one kilogram of rubber per race according to Pirelli’s head of F1 Mario Isola, possibly contributing to the car being underweight.
Mercedes has not yet said whether this was the cause of the disqualification, although Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ trackside engineering director said: “We expect that the loss of rubber from the one stop was a contributing factor — and we'll work to understand how it happened.”
If you crunch the numbers, on average a driver loses 0.1 seconds per lap for every extra kilo he has. Russell was 1.5 kg lighter, and as a result he was able to get 0.15 seconds per lap out of the other drivers. And if we multiply this by the 32 laps he did without stopping, he gained 4.8 seconds of speed at the end of the race.
But if Russell had had the right weighting, these 4.8 seconds would have worked against him, as he would have obtained a fourth or fifth place position on mathematical terms.
Disqualifications are an incredibly rare sighting in Formula One, but not exactly extinct. In 2021, it happened to Sebastian Vettel with Aston Martin after finishing second in the Hungarian Grand Prix. During the technical inspection, it was deemed that Vettel did not have enough fuel samples, therefore disqualified.
Mercedes can appeal for declassification, similar to what Aston Martin did back in 2021, but it is highly unlikely that they will get a positive response from the stewards.
In this dynamic season with several winners, Russell was about to have his second win of the season, taking the second most wins out of all drivers in the 2024 season. However, the title has been passed on to Hamilton, as the win column is still led by Max Verstappen, who has accumulated seven victories so far into the season.
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