McLaren team principal Martin Whitmarsh says Lewis Hamilton’s Twitter behaviour, in which he posted a photo of his qualifying telemetry, was simply an ‘error of judgement’.
The McLaren driver posted the photo showing his and Jenson Button’s data, but quickly removed it at the request of the team.
Whitmarsh hopes to move on from the incident after Hamilton apologised.
“I think he made an error of judgement, and we asked him to take that one down and he did,” said Whitmarsh. “I think he realises that, and I don’t think it’s had an impact on his weekend.”
“It would be interesting to see how other team principals would deal with it. But I think no, it was an error of judgement, it was corrected fairly quickly and apologised for. We move on.”
Whilst some in the paddock described the data in the image as a ‘gold mine’ for rival teams, McLaren’s technical director Paddy Lowe doubted such claims.
“I have had several engineers approach me and it wasn’t great, but in reality it is more about that we don’t share data with the world. The actual data in there isn’t going to be any great use to anyone, I don’t think there is much damage done.”