Mercedes reveals extent of Hamilton's damage in Mexico

Mercedes has explained the extent of Lewis Hamilton's car damage at the Mexican Grand Prix on Sunday.

The Silver Arrows has concluded that the Briton was losing one-tenth of a second per lap following his contact with Max Verstappen on the opening lap of the race.

The pair came together at Turn 2, which saw both of them skip across the grass and lose time to Ferrari, who held the first two positions at the opening stage of the event.

"When Lewis and Verstappen tangled at the start there was actually a reasonable amount of damage to Lewis’s car in the subsequent collision," Mercedes technical director James Allison said in Mercedes' Pure Pit Wall debrief. 

"If you watch the race footage carefully, you’ll just see a strip of bodywork flying up past the camera and that strip of bodywork was a piece of Lewis’s floor disappearing from the scene. That strip of bodywork is a thing we call the wouvre panel and it runs down the outside edge of the floor.

"There was also a little bit of damage to the front wing endplate and these two things combined to give Lewis a loss of aerodynamic downforce equivalent to about point one of a second per lap."

Allison added that while the time loss may not sound significant, it added to Hamilton's "very fine" drive, as he crossed the line only a couple of second in front of Sebastian Vettel.

"It might not sound a lot but if you remember that the race is 70 laps long, then over the course of that entire race, that’s worth about seven seconds.

"Remembering that at the end of the race Lewis was less than two seconds in front of Vettel, you can see that those seven seconds are a meaningful amount.

"And it adds emphasis to the fact this was a very fine, very controlled drive that Lewis put in on Sunday, able to stay ahead of the Ferrari, showing good pace and good consistency despite carrying that damage throughout