Guenther Steiner Reveals the Person Responsible for George Russell’s Disqualification From Belgian GP

George Russell suffered a massive heartbreak at the 2024 Belgian GP as the FIA disqualified him from the race for an underweight car despite him crossing the chequered flag in P1. Since the Briton faced such agony despite all his hard work, former F1 team principal Guenther Steiner was recently asked in an interview who he believes was responsible for the 26-year-old’s disqualification at Spa.

The Italian-American revealed on the Red Flags Podcast that it is usually the job of a race engineer to ensure that the cars meet the requirement of the minimum weight after a race. Steiner said,

“The race engineer, normally, is doing that [monitoring the data related to the weight of the car] and they just…I don’t know if they missed something or they really did not think they were going to do a one-stop.”

It is common for cars to lose weight due to a loss of tread that comes from tire degradation. In order to address this issue, drivers usually pick up discarded rubber and marbles off the racing line during a cool-down lap to gain the weight the car would have lost over the course of a race.

However, according to Point No.14 of the Race Director’s Event notes, drivers had to drive into Parc Ferme directly after the chequered flag was shown at Spa. This meant that Russell did not get the opportunity to pick up any kind of discarded rubber. Hence, this could also have been a reason why Russell’s W15 ended up being 1.5 kg underweight.

Russell thought he had executed his masterplan to perfection to win the Belgian GP

44 laps around the Circuit de Spa-Francorchamps were forecasted to be heavy on the tires. Hence, a two-stop strategy was considered to be the fastest one during the Grand Prix. However, Russell managed to pull off a fantastic one-stopper, much to the surprise of his rivals and F1 experts.

While Mercedes had asked Russell to pit around lap 29 for his second stop, the #63 driver had overruled that call made by the team. Instead, he asked them to consider a one-stopper which ended up keeping his teammate Lewis Hamilton behind him until the chequered flag.

Unfortunately, for Russell, the one-stop meant his set of hard tires (which had done an immense 34-lap stint) were more degraded than the others. Therefore, as explained previously, the increased loss of tread from the tire degradation also meant his car would have lost more weight compared to the others.