F1 waives Brazil curfew as teams face all-nighter amid freight delays

On Wednesday, it emerged that a number of teams were still waiting on freight to arrive from Mexico to Brazil following last weekend’s race.

In the drivers’ press conference, seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton hinted that Mercedes’ engines hadn’t even arrived yet with the delays being caused by poor weather in Mexico.

Speaking on Thursday morning in Sao Paulo, Haas team boss Guenther Steiner revealed that the plane transporting Haas’ freight had arrived just 45 minutes before speaking to the media.

“I think it’s in Brazil now,” Steiner said. “It’s landed, but I don’t think it’s on the track, everything yet. I think it’s transported now. The plane landed, I was told 45 minutes ago. So it should be at the track.”

Due to the delay in the freight arriving, Steiner confirmed that his mechanics will be forced to work through the night to ensure the cars are ready ahead of Friday practice.

“I think the guys just have to work through the night,” Steiner added. “That’s the only thing we can do. I don’t know if we need to work through the night ut it will be for sure a late night. All the rest of the regulations have been changed as of this morning.

“We know the curfew and the scrutineering times have been all adjusted. We can still do the event as planned, not change the timetable of the event. That’s the plan. I just know our stuff is in Brazil I don’t know about the others’ stuff.”

Steiner confirmed that Haas was without its engines this morning but also some tools to be able to build the cars.

“Normally we have the sea freight, that is the garage building, the hospitality,” he explained. “That’s the sea freight.

”Every team has about five or six sets which are coming in containers. They have arrived without a problem, so they could set up the garage and hospitality building. We were lucky that the IT equipment came with the plane, that is not in sea freight, but what is missing… I don’t know exactly which car parts are missing but for sure the engines are missing.

“I think the toolboxes were missing, without those you can’t work because that is all going in the air freight. So we still cannot work on the cars. Some of the parts may be there but we cannot work on them because we do not have the tools.”