The 2021 British Grand Prix saw a change in format with the new sprint qualifying replacing the Saturday afternoon time slot. Home hero Lewis Hamilton took P1 on Friday afternoon to start the sprint qualification from first place, but within a few hundred meters Max Verstappen took the lead from him to win the first ever 3 championship points for sprint qualifying victory. Hamilton could not hide his disappointment, but with the race in standard format on Sunday there wasn’t much time to reboot. Starting now from second, Hamilton was fighting Max for the lead at nearly every corner. With the pace of Verstappen’s Red Bull, he knew the first lap was important to try and find a way through if I was to enjoy any other lap round the Silverstone Circuit. So after failing to materialize any of the previous attempts to overtake, Lewis took out every trick in the book to get himself in front on the back straight. He sold the dummy and got towards the inside line, drawing close to side-by-side for the lead into Copse corner, the inevitable happened. The two championship rivals came together, with Max on the receiving end, suffering a 51G impact whilst the guy who caused continued with minor damage.
This 3D animations shows the different lines the competitors took at that fast righthander, comparing it with a normal (uncompromised) racing line obtained from Max Verstappen’s qualifying Q3 lap, which was good enough for second place on Friday. The image below shows an complete overview of the different racing lines as seen from above.
Due to size of the impact and the required barrier repairs, the race was red flagged. This meant any damage on Hamilton’s car could be fixed without him having to make a pitstop. The stewards did decide to give a 10 second time penalty to Hamilton, which he could serve at his next pit stop without much inconvenience, and two penalty points on his super license. Hamilton went on to take the win late on from Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc who had been leading since lap 1.
Crash Research
Trackside images and FOM footage to pinpoint the exact position of the cars relative to each other and the circuit edges. This is a careful process but mismatches will always occur, however these are in the order of 10 centimeters or less for important moments, and can deviate to half a meter for irrelevant situations, like hundreds of meters before a crash. As a proof of concept I present here two overlays with FOM footage, which sadly cannot be shown as a full video, due to copyright reasons.
For the ones with a good eye for detail, the onboard camera settings in the render for the image below is different than the one used in the video. This had to be done due to real camera having a fisheye lens, which is not possible to replicate with the render engine (Blender’s Eevee) used for the videos. To replicate a fisheye effect (backwards) raytracing (Cycles render engine) was used to properly match the screenshot from the FOM footage.