Mercedes chief technical director James Allison says the easiest way to repair Lewis Hamilton's damaged front wing at the British Grand Prix was with glue and tape. Hamilton's front wing endplate was broken due to his collision with Max Verstappen on lap one of the race which saw the Red Bull driver crash out of the Grand Prix. The event was red flagged which allowed Mercedes to rectify the damage to Hamilton's car. "The wing aerodynamically was completely unaffected by the incident," said Allison on Mercedes' debrief video. "All the bits that generate the downforce, look after the performance of the car, they were just pukka and we knew very, very clearly what the balance of the car was with that wing on that day "We didn’t need to disturb the car in any way by putting a new front wing on because the small manufacturing differences between the front wings might have given us a slightly different balance. "It was far more expedient just to fix the tiny bit of damage that we had incurred which was the breaking free of the front tyre temperature sensor from its mounting, just to quickly fix that with a bit of tape and glue rather than have to change the whole element. "It was just the easiest thing for us to do at the time and the best way of ensuring that we would have identical performance after the restart from what we had before.” Hamilton went on to win the British GP and Mercedes have revealed if the race was not stopped, they would have been forced to retire the seven-time world champion . Nevertheless, Allison admits his team were lucky that the damage was easily repairable in a short amount of time. “We were lucky, the damage was pretty minor," continued Allison. "We had a broken or nearly broken front left rim and also some relatively cosmetic damage to the front wing endplate, where a little sensor that we have that looks back at the tyres to measure their temperature had been broken off at its stalk and was just hanging by the sensor wire instead of the nice mounting that we make for it.”
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