Lewis Hamilton says Mercedes have found it difficult to increase the performance of their power unit during the winter and need to improve its reliability.
The world champion was stopped by a problem with his power unit yesterday and Mercedes customers Williams have had to change their units twice during the six days of pre-season testing.“It was a difficult winter last year and I think it’s been a difficult winter this year,” said Hamilton. “There was a period of time where this the V6 turbo era we were just gaining, gaining, gaining, gaining, gaining. And eventually just with everything, you get to a point of diminishing returns. How much more can you squeeze out of a V6 turbo? How much further can you [go]? We’ve kind of been that that peak top speed area now where there’s only a kilometre more that you’re going to gain, for a lot of investment.
“But I fully believe and trust in the guys to be methodical with the way they move forwards. The engine is actually very good, and an improvement from last year, it’s just not quite where we want it to be reliability-wise. But I’m sure they’re back at the factory now, working as hard as they can to rectify those issues.”
Hamilton admitted his stoppage yesterday caused some disruption to the team’s test programme, but they recovered some of it today.
“I would have hoped we’d have a full day yesterday,” he said. “If I could have gotten 90, 100 laps yesterday would have been useful, there was a couple of things we missed in the test program because of the incident. But we recovered most of it today.”
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Phylyp (@phylyp)
28th February 2020, 16:51
It would be very interesting to see some R&D costs associated with this, i.e.:
1) R&D $ per hp in 2014
2) R&D $ per additional hp since then
I wonder if the difference between the two would approach an order of magnitude (i.e. hundreds of thousands of dollars for the baseline 2014 HP, and closer to a million for additional gains).
Sensord4notbeingafanboi (@peartree)
28th February 2020, 20:04
Williams has that old Ferrari style plume coming from the back. All mercs are sm0k1ng like the Ferraris used to. New FIA guidelines on the PU. Why, all of the sudden, are the mercs sm0k1ng like crazy?
Phylyp (@phylyp)
28th February 2020, 23:45
@peartree – hm, your question suddenly made me wonder if two separate things were related – the smoky Mercs, and the FIA’s belated announcement about Ferrari.
Warning – huge speculation ahead: Maybe Merc have found a way to burn oil via some other loophole, and have told the FIA they intend to deploy those into their engines unless the FIA make a statement on the Ferrari PU. Cue the FIA issuing a terse non-statement statement at the eleventh hour.
DonSmee (@david-beau)
29th February 2020, 5:51
They were always smoky especially pre-formation laps.
Sensord4notbeingafanboi (@peartree)
29th February 2020, 17:00
@david-beau Yes, to a certain extent all smoke, str used to do it a lot leaving the pits. In testing, the Williams had the Ferrari plume, all the time. The works mercs were at times smoking every couple corners. @phylyp Eventually Mercedes was going to figure out what Ferrari was exploiting. I don’t know what happened yesterday but I adore the speculations.
erikje
28th February 2020, 22:05
time to make up the balance..
6 engines changes on Mercs.
2 engine changes on Hondas
lots of engine changes on renault
3 engine changes on ferraris.
Please mutate if other info is available.