Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes power unit should not be at risk from the same failure which stopped his team mate Valtteri Bottas in practice yesterday, according to Toto Wolff.
A hydraulic failure halted Bottas shortly before the end of the final practice session.“We’ve just heard that Valtteri’s reliability issue shouldn’t affect Lewis’s engine,” Wolff said yesterday. Hamilton will win the world championship if he finishes at least seventh in today’s race.
“Nevertheless it is a reminder how fragile the situation is and how much everybody is pushing in order to extract performance.
“Reliability will continue to play a crucial role in this championship and that’s why tomorrow it’s about finding the right focus in finishing the race with the best possible performance.”
Wolff said Bottas’s engine will have to go back to the team’s base to be examined because of the unusual nature of the failure.
“The failure we have seen on Valtteri’s engine is a failure we haven’t seen for many years. You can call it a very unusual failure with mileage where it shouldn’t have happened. So we need to investigate that. The engine is going to go back to England.
“The [High Performance Powertrain] guys and mechanics have done a really incredible job first in getting the engine onto the car in time and then calibrating it in a way so it can run here. That was not trivial. They kind of got it together, Valtteri said he couldn’t feel a big difference, that’s really making me very happy.”
Having struggled on Friday, Mercedes were much more competitive on Saturday, which Wolff said was partly due to overnight changes to their power unit.
“The main areas of improved performance was that we got the power unit to work happier in the ambient. And on the chassis side everybody was lacking grip yesterday and I think we found the right tools to tune the car so the drivers are happier.”
Advert | Become a RaceFans supporter and
2018 F1 season
- McLaren staff told us we were “totally crazy” to take Honda engines in 2018 – Tost
- ‘It doesn’t matter if we start last’: How Red Bull’s junior team aided Honda’s leap forward
- Honda’s jet division helped F1 engineers solve power unit problem
- McLaren Racing losses rise after Honda split
- Ricciardo: Baku “s***show” was Red Bull’s fault
Gabriel (@rethla)
28th October 2018, 10:52
Bottas failure shouldnt have happened so it shouldnt happen to Hamilton either, Meanwhile we will look into why it happened back at home… ok.
papaya
28th October 2018, 11:36
Bottas’s sort of failure shouldn’t happen on Hamilton’s car. But Hamilton could’ve any other engine related potential failure which wouldn’t related to Bottas’s. Oh…
Stephen Crowsen (@drycrust)
28th October 2018, 16:10
Shouldn’t this engine change result in grid penalties?
Phylyp (@phylyp)
28th October 2018, 16:20
@drycrust – they’ve swapped back to an engine from his existing pool. Remember that engine penalties occur when the PU component used exceeds 3/2 based on component, not when a swap is made.