Mercedes are working hard to prepare two cars for the Monaco Grand Prix after Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg crashed out at the last event in Spain a week previously, with the team forced to check the structural integrity of 1200 parts before they can be used again.
With Monaco practice on Thursday, the team have even less time to complete the task, coupled with the fact they can get through 100 parts a day, means they're having to work round the clock to get the cars rebuilt in time for the race weekend.
"Fortunately, these sort of incidents are very rare for us," explained chief operating officer Rob Thomas.
"But when they do happen we have quite a good process in place to deal with it. When it happened, we all had our head in our hands for about ten seconds, and then we all think, 'Ok, so what next ?'.
"As the process happens, we're hungry for information, so immediately we'll be contacting ourselves within the factory asking what we should do. When the cars get back to the garage at the circuit, a lot of analysis already goes on and a lot of phone calls and photographs come back to us.
"We get a quarantine list of 'suspected' parts, and on this occasion we had about 1200 parts listed as suspect. When the cars are back at the factory they are carefully taken apart and all the parts are blown throughout the factory for inspection or testing of the structural integrity. About 100 parts we get looked at in 24 hours and that will tell us our workload."
The unique Monaco weekend, which starts on Thursday, means everything has to be built and shipped on Monday according to Thomas.
"Basically, we start building the cars on Friday and we have three days to pull it all together and build two cars to go to Monaco. It's all about compromise and making quick decisions.
"We know we've got a pretty competitive car, so everybody is massively motivated to make sure we get these performance parts together and we go in the best possible conditions to the the circuit."
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