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Mercedes 'doing a lot of work' on starts

Cape Town - Mercedes will be spending this week "doing a lot of work" on race starts after wheel spin dropped Lewis Hamilton into Kimi Raikkonen's clutches at Silverstone. 

Hamilton started Sunday's grand prix from pole position but lost out at the start, challenged by Sebastian Vettel and Valtteri Bottas. 

As a result he found himself third, one place ahead of Kimi Raikkonen. Next thing he was tagged by the Finn and dropped to P18. 

Although Hamilton recovered to finish second, Mercedes concede they need to work on their race starts to prevent similar incidents in the future. 

"I think the first thing we need to understand is where can we improve and where can we engineer," said motorsport boss Toto Wolff. 

"We need to find some performance in the race starts to avoid incidents like we saw [at Silverstone]. 

"This is something we can change." 

Mercedes engineer Andrew Shovlin revealed the Brackley squad will be doing a lot of work on their race starts before heading to Germany for round 11 of the championship. 

"The simple answer is we got some wheel spin," he said when asked what went wrong with Hamilton's start. There was a bit less grip on the grid than we were expecting. 

"We had done practice starts there, Silverstone they do actually let you do a start from the grid, but for some reason on Sunday we didn't quite have what we expected and as soon as you get the wheel spin you lose traction. 

"That then lost him places pretty quickly. 

"So, we are doing a lot of work here this week trying to understand that because we know fine well that if we qualify on pole, we have got to get off the line as well as the Ferraris and that's what we will be trying to do in Hockenheim."

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