Pit stop record broken in China

Mercedes have revealed that they broke its own pit stop record of the wider tyre era in China.

The stop that broke the record contributed to Valtteri Bottas getting in front of Sebastien Vettel for the race lead.

The official stop time for the Finn was 2.15s – winning the DHL Fastest Pitstop award – but Mercedes says that by its own internal measure, the stop was even quicker.

"We were 3.3s behind Sebastian when we came into the pit lane in order to execute the undercut," said Mercedes chief strategist James Vowles

"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."