Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas suffered two punctures in the British Grand Prix last Sunday. Immediately messages surfaced that possibly the DAS system could be the cause. Mercedes, however, suppressed those rumours.

The DAS system helps to warm up the tyres. However, there is no link between the deployment of the DAS concept and the flat tyres at Silverstone. “A lot of questions this year, but also specifically [for] this race, were around DAS and whether that contributed to the failure or not. I can categorically say the answer is no", says James Vowles in the review of Mercedes.

Mercedes comes with two reasons

The first reason Mercedes puts forward is that the DAS system was not used at or around the time the punctures occurred. "First of all, it wasn’t used any time really towards the element of the failure. In fact it was used really towards the early stages of the race and that’s it."

The strategist of the German world champion then also points out that Carlos Sainz of McLaren suffered a puncture. "They are not using a DAS system on their car and a number of other competitors complained of the vibration that Valtteri was", the British top man concludes.