F1’s sole tyre supplier on Wednesday apologised to Lewis Hamilton after the championship leader suffered a right-front failure during the recent Turkish grand prix.
At the Monza test, head of track engineering operations Kees van de Grint reportedly walked into the McLaren garage and accepted Bridgestone’s side of responsibility for the delamination that dropped Hamilton from third to just fifth with 15 laps to go in Istanbul.
Following detailed examinations back in Tokyo, Bridgestone determined this week that excessive ‘chunking’ contributed to the failure, as well as a so-far unexplained extra force impacting the damaged surface of the tyre.
“It could have been a stone or the edge of a kerb that he unfortunately hit,” Dutchman van de Grint told Auto Motor und Sport.
Also at Monza on Wednesday, meanwhile, Hamilton’s Woking based team demonstrated meticulous driver equality when teammate Fernando Alonso shared the single MP4-22 with his British teammate.
Both drivers lapped the high speed Italian circuit exactly 49 times; Hamilton for three and a half hours in the morning and Alonso after lunch until the close of play at 5pm.
