Ahead of the first Saudi Arabia Grand Prix this weekend, Mercedes announced a new partnership with Irish company Kingspan, whose logos can now be seen on the team’s W12 car, driven by Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas.
The Irish building materials company manufactured some of the insulation panels that were used in the renovation of the Grenfell Tower. 72 people were killed in a fire that broke out in the apartment block in June 2017.
A former employee told a public investigation that Kingspan’s new formulation of its K15 insulation, installed on Grenfell Tower, burned “like an angry inferno” in a pre-disaster fire test in 2007.
The investigation also found that the company had used an old passport result from 2005 to resell its cladding for high-rise buildings across the UK, with company executives ignoring safety concerns.
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Grenfell United has written a letter to Mercedes CEO Toto Wolff asking the team to “sever your relationship with Kingspan immediately”.
“Kingspan played a central role in inflicting the pain and suffering we feel today, and there must be some public censure for Kingspan’s ruthlessness and carelessness towards human life,” it said.
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UK Foreign Secretary for Housing and Communities, Micheal Gove, also joined the conviction.
He tweeted: “Deeply disappointed that @ MercedesAMGF1 is accepting sponsorship from the Kingspan disguise company while the Grenfell investigation is ongoing. I’ll write to Mercedes to ask them to reconsider. The Grenfell community deserves better. “
A Mercedes spokesperson said: “Our partner Kingspan has supported and continues to support the vital work of the investigation to find out what went wrong in the Grenfell Tower tragedy and why.
“Our new partnership announced this week focuses on sustainability and will help us achieve our goals in this area.”
The post Mercedes’ Kingspan F1 sponsorship outrages survivors of the Grenfell fire first appeared on monter-une-startup.
