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23h ago
By Alan Baldwin
NURBURG, GERMANY – Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas must live ‘like hermits’ to reduce the risk of Covid-19 infecting their battle for the Formula One title, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said Friday after the team report a second positive test result.
A Mercedes spokesman said the entire team had been retested after the first positive appeared on Thursday before the weekend’s Eifel Grand Prix at the German Nuerburgring.
One of them was also positive and another was inconclusive, he added.
Four more team members, who tested negative on all tests, were then isolated according to sport protocols, while six replacements arrived from England.
“Every loss of an important member in the garage affects the race, but I think we have it under control,” Wolff told reporters.
The Austrian said every precaution was being taken to protect six-time world champion Hamilton and Bottas, who are 44 points behind the Brit after 10 races, on the circuit and elsewhere.
“The drivers are the most restricted of the whole group, of the whole team,” said Wolff.
“It’s certainly not a great situation for them because you almost need to live like a hermit and that’s what they are doing.
“They’re at home, they don’t go out to dinner, they don’t meet other people. Inside the team, when we do the Zoom or Microsoft Teams reports, they’re not sitting with the engineers in the room.
“They are sitting in their own rooms and we are avoiding any personal contact with them as much as possible. It is literally getting in the car and driving the car and keeping our distance.”
Racing Point’s Sergio Perez missed two races in August after contracting the virus, the Mexican remains the only driver to have tested positive and the consequences for the top two are potentially massive.
Hamilton is on the brink of a career-high 91 wins this weekend and is on track to equal all seven of Michael Schumacher’s titles.
The season ends with a triple header in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi and Wolff acknowledged that missing a race or two would be a critical hit.
“Unfortunately for them, they need to live a bit of a secluded life, but we think the decisions we’ve made are good to protect them,” he said of the drivers.
Reuters
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