The shattered remains of Lewis Hamilton’s front left corner is being rushed back to Woking for analysis.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Almost within sight of the chequered flag in Barcelona, the 2008 world champion’s McLaren speared into a barrier after a sudden tyre failure, costing him second place both in the race and in the world championship standings.<\/p>\n
Team boss Martin Whitmarsh immediately speculated that “debris” probably caused the problem, while Bridgestone said its initial impression was that “this was not caused by a tyre issue”.<\/p>\n
“We are working closely with McLaren to understand what happened,” added the Japanese supplier’s Hirohide Hamashima.<\/p>\n
As the sun rises again in Europe on Monday morning, the leading theory now is that a stone became stuck in the wheel rim.<\/p>\n
After qualifying, Rubens Barrichello took photos with his mobile phone camera of his FW32 and his helmet, so amazed was he about the damage caused by flying stones.<\/p>\n
And he told Germany’s Auto Motor und Sport that he had to nurse his vibrating Williams to the chequered flag after feeling a “strong shock” on the left front.<\/p>\n
“We had to slow him down to ensure we didn’t have a problem with the tyres,” confirmed technical director Sam Michael.\u00a0 “We’ll be looking into that for the next race.”<\/p>\n
Barrichello suspects a stone got stuck in the wheel rim, and a similar cause was also not being ruled out to explain Sebastian Vettel’s brake problem.<\/p>\n
After the Red Bull was inspected, Christian Horner revealed that the brake disc “was a bit damaged”.<\/p>\n
“We will only know for sure in the factory,” added the Briton.<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF|GMM<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The shattered remains of Lewis Hamilton’s front left corner is being rushed back to Woking for analysis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[128,5262,5261,5340,1136,154,491,5284],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5224"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5224"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5224\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5225,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5224\/revisions\/5225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}