2024 United States GP

Strong Recovery for George at the United States GP in Austin

George fights his way up from the pit lane to sixth place in the US Grand Prix, with Lewis retiring from the race.

The United States Grand Prix at Austin, Texas was the first race of the penultimate triple-header of the season. George started from the pit lane after an accident in Qualifying, but made up a lot of ground in an impressive 40-lap stint on the Hard tyres, fighting his way into the points until his only pit stop. He maintained a strong pace throughout, overtaking Sergio Perez in the closing stages of the race to take P6.

At the start of the race, Lewis made up five places before Turn 1 with a superb launch and was in P12 for the first few laps until he spun off the track at Turn 19 and got stuck in the gravel.

After a difficult weekend in Austin, the team heads straight to Mexico City for the second race of the triple-header.

Lewis Hamilton

I had a great start, and I thought we were in for a positive race. I was just bringing the tyres in when I had the accident, which was a really strange moment. I wasn’t pushing too hard but the car bounced a little into turn 19, I lost the back end and that was that. We measured a large gust of wind, up to 40 kph, as I turned in which likely didn’t help. George had a similar spin to me yesterday so we will work hard to analyse both incidents and see what we can learn from them.

I am sorry to the whole team who have worked so hard to bring these updates but onwards and upwards from here. Hopefully we can get the car in a better place for next week in Mexico. We will all be working incredibly hard to do so.

Andrew Shovlin, Trackside Engineering Director

Given that we had one car starting at the back and one in the pit lane, we had realistic expectations as to what could be achieved today. Lewis made a good start and was quickly up to P12. Unfortunately, that didn't last long as he lost the rear in turn 19. We're still investigating what caused that, but in any case, his race was over.

George was making steady progress through the field in his first stint, but it still took him until the halfway point to get any clear air to judge pace. Encouragingly, the car was hanging on to its tyres well and that was allowing us to extend. P6 was the best he could have achieved today, and he drove a good race to get there.

As a team we have underachieved across the weekend and are under no illusions that we need to do better. The update kit has shown some promise, but we've not had a single clean session, and we'll leave here not knowing what we could have done if we'd started near the front with a car in our latest aero specification. We will look to answer that question next weekend in Mexico.

2024 United States GP Result