Thread by @fiagirly

#F1: Three hours to go for the #USGP and we sit on some gambles from the top teams.

In spite of the amazing pole position, Red Bull are facing a few concerns in their garage. In an attempt to counter the technical superiority shown by the Mercedes during FP1, RB decided to risk

sending out the RB16B’s with a lower ground clearance - in comparison to the W12 - but this is coming with serious damage to their rear wing.

Keeping the car this low and crawling over the bumps caused small subsidence/cracks on

the main profile of Max’s wing which the team had to reinforce before Qualifying.

In addition to adding carbon in the lower and upper part of the main profile of car 33, the technicians decided to make a similar intervention also on Perez's RB16B which was analysed overnight.

“(…) we didn't understand if Max hit something because a nice crack appeared on the wing. They allowed us to put reinforcements for safety reasons, and we also introduced them on Perez's car, although there were no breakages.” - Christian Horner

Contrasting Red Bull’s work with that of Mercedes, team boss Toto Wolff explained that the silver arrows were obliged to take steps not to “massacre” its cars after they bottomed on COTA’s aggressive bumps during practice (similar to what Red Bull endured with their rear wing)

Mercedes took the decision to go easy on their car. “The car was bottoming out quite heavy, and that breaks the car, so we took some mitigating steps to not break it, or massacre it that hard, in order to survive the race,” Toto Wolff explained.

“Definitely [it was] a compromise for going faster on the track, but maybe a necessity to actually finish.”

So Mercedes have sacrificed a bit of speed in order to be more assured with reliability whereas Red Bull have gone all out for performance despite the visible challenges that are coming with sitting the car so low.

Combined sources from it.motorsport.com and autosport.com