Marcus Ericsson didn’t have any sympathy for Kimi Raikkonen after his drinks problem in Hungary, revealing he hasn’t raced with a bottle for two years.
The Finn was heard complaining over the radio about not being able to get a drink after his Ferrari team forgot to connect the straw that feeds inside the helmet to the bottle inside the car.
That certainly wasn’t ideal in conditions well over 30 degrees in the air and upwards of 60 inside the cockpit, levels only really matched by the hottest races in Bahrain and Singapore.
However, for the fellow Scandinavian, it was just another day on the job.
“Haven’t had a drink system installed for over 2 years (including today),” he wrote on Twitter replying to a tweet from journalist Will Buxton.
“It weighs around 1.5 kg. So we choose not to use it because of the weight. Just one of the reasons why we should have the same weight for all drivers.”
Ericsson is one of the taller drivers on the grid and, therefore, one of the heaviest and his response refers to a problem F1 has had for several years with teams struggling to stay close to the permitted minimum weight of a car, which is 733kg.
That figure does also include the driver, which is why every last kilo the taller ones can lose is important, however, from 2019, 80kg of the 740kg minimum will be allocated for the driver and ballast used to bring smaller drivers upto that number.
