Mercedes’ Andrew Shovlin has explained a problem with the throttle damper assembly was what caused Kimi Antonelli to retire in Imola.

The Italian’s first home race in F1 came to an abrupt end when he pulled to the side of the track having lost throttle control.

Mercedes explain cause of Kimi Antonelli Imola GP DNF

Shovlin explained that rather than the throttle causing the actual retirement, it was the car deciding there was too much going wrong and prompted a shutdown itself.

“We haven’t got completely to the bottom of it, but it was relatively easy to at least work out which faults were causing the issue,: he said.

“So it was a problem with the throttle damper assembly. We were seeing on the car that occasionally he wasn’t getting to full throttle.

“Now we can run routines that allow us to recalibrate those [sensors] live while we’re driving, but ultimately it’s a big safety issue if the throttle is malfunctioning.

“So the thing that stopped him was actually the car’s own programme deciding that there was enough going wrong here that it was going to shut down that throttle signal. And that was obviously what brought the car to a halt.

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“Now, with the fault that we had, we weren’t going to make the end of the race anyway, so we’d always err on the side of caution.

With Imola being the start of a triple header, Mercedes quickly shipped the faulty part back to their Brackley base ahead of this weekend’s trip to Monaco but Shovlin was confident it would not cause any disruption in Monte Carlo.

“We’ve identified the assembly that’s at fault. That came back overnight with us. We’ve got it here back in Brackley,” he said.

“They even started stripping that during the night. So those investigations are going on and it’s unlikely to be a particularly difficult thing to solve for Monaco.

“Not guaranteed though that we won’t be making some design changes for future races. So in the short term, we’ll contain it, longer term there might be a design change.”

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