Mercedes broke pit stop record in China

It might not have been the best weekend on-track of the Silver Arrows but in the pit lane, they were running on all cylinders. The team says they broke their own record for fastest pitstop time during the race.

Chief strategist James Vowles in a Mercedes video that the team was perfect when it came to the pitstop.

"We were 3.3s behind Sebastian when we came into the pit lane in order to execute the undercut.

"A few things came towards us perfectly all together at the same time.

"The first was that our pitstop was incredible. In this new era we did a 1.83s time, based on our traffic light system. That's very quick, since Austin 2016 with the smaller wheels and tyres, we haven't done times around that.

"And Sebastian's stop was round about 0.9s slower, if you measure across the pitlane time, and the pit stop was around 0.7s of that. So already straight away you've eaten into his margin.

"Valtteri's out-lap was extraordinary. We have a number of messages we gave to Valtteri, to make sure he knew what he needed to do, and it was like a qualifying lap, he executed it perfectly, he didn't make any mistakes.

"All of that came together beautifully to allow Valtteri to come out around 0.7s ahead of Sebastian. It was an undercut, it was a pitstop coming together at the same time, and it was a fantastic out-lap from Valtteri."