The deal with fairing company Kingspan was announced just last week, with the logo appearing on the cars of Mercedes drivers Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas for the weekend’s race in Saudi Arabia.
However, it was a deal that received a lot of backlash for Kingspan’s alleged isolation ties at Grenfell Tower.
British Housing Minister Michael Gove said in a letter to Mercedes Formula 1 team boss Toto Wolff that he hoped the team would “rethink” the commercial partnership, as it “threatens to undermine all the good work of the company and the sport”. ”
The Grenfell United campaign group, made up of survivors and bereaved dependents of the fire, said it met with Wolff to give him and his team “the facts about Kingspan’s involvement in Grenfell” after calling for the partnership to split.
“The new partnership announced last week included Kingspan chairing a new sustainability working group for the team, aiming to reduce carbon emissions for the team’s future campus through their leading green solutions,” Mercedes said on Twitter.
“However, in retrospect, both parties have come to the conclusion that a continuation of the partnership is not appropriate at this point in time, despite the intended positive effects, and we have therefore agreed that it will be terminated with immediate effect.”
In a statement released on Wednesday, Kingspan said: “We are deeply aware of the sensitivities of the past few days and have therefore jointly agreed that it is not appropriate to move forward at this time.”
Grenfell United said it was “pleased” to hear the news of the termination of their deal with Kingspan.
Kingspan added that it “played no part in the refurbishment of the Grenfell Tower” but also acknowledged that the “Kingspan Insulation UK deal is a key participant in the Grenfell Tower investigation”. In Gove’s letter to Wolff, he said that Kingspan manufactured K15 insulation that was used in the Grenfell Tower and that Kingspan employees’ testimony in the Grenfell Tower investigation indicated that they knew their “products were more flammable than.” they had advertised “.
“In written and oral testimony, former Kingspan employees have accepted that their approach to certifying the materials was ‘fundamentally misleading,'” says Gove, “and that they definitely knew it was more flammable than they represented it; and that you knew it The approach was ‘to get away with as much as possible’ ”
In its statement on Wednesday, Kingspan said it assumed the issue was “complex”.
“We didn’t do the cladding on the Grenfell Tower,” said the company. “The investigation itself revealed that the ‘main cause’ of the rapid fire spread on Grenfell was the polyethylene-core ACM facade used on the outside of the building. No facade system using this PE-ACM facade would have been independent of the insulation used. ” the necessary large-scale system fire test. In this unsafe and non-conforming system, our K15 insulation board was misused.
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“We did not deliver or recommend K15 to Grenfell Tower. K15 made up about 5% of the insulation layer of the facade system. It was replaced without our knowledge.
“We have completed new tests that support the previous fire protection statements of the three historical K15 large-scale system tests that came into question during the inquiry process.”
The Grenfell Tower investigation is ongoing.
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