• Belgian Grand Prix

Twitter posts land Hamilton in hot water

The telemetry data published by Lewis Hamilton © Twitter

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• Feature:
• Smash-ups at Spa
  

• Drivers:
• Lewis Hamilton

• Teams:
• McLaren

Lewis Hamilton's utterly forgettable weekend on the track at Spa ended with him further distanced from his McLaren team after he posted publishing secret details of the performance of his team's cars on his Twitter account.

Hamilton had already deleted a less than gracious post after team-mate Jenson Button took pole on Saturday, but he underlined a lack of appreciation as to the consequences of posts on Twitter when he posted a picture of the telemetry traces of the McLarens' performances. Although the post was again deleted, the image remained for all to see

Red Bull boss Christian Horner said "I'm sure every engineer in the pit lane is having a very close look at it", adding that if his drivers did the same it would be "a breach of confidentiality effectively".

McLaren boss Martin Whitmarsh's public reaction to his Saturday outburst was that Hamilton's Twitter account was a personal thing, but the publishing of the confidential information crossed an altogether different line. "He was asked to take [the tweet] down and he did it immediately," Whitmarsh said. "He misjudged the situation. All the other ones we didn't ask him to remove, but that one he removed and apologised. He wasn't thinking clearly, obviously."

However, McLaren technical director Paddy Lowe said the information in the image would not be of any great use to the team's rivals.

"In reality it wasn't great because we don't share data with the world, the the actual data in there is not going to be of any great use to our competitors I would say. I don't think there is actually any technical damage done. It was a genuine mistake on his part. The engineers don't like to see that because we spend our lives trying to keep things secret. It's more what it represents than what was [in the image]."

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