Mercedes technical director James Allison has explained why the team didn’t take advantage of Lewis Hamilton’s poor qualifying position for the United States Grand Prix to change his car’s set-up for the race or give him a fresh engine.
Hamilton was eliminated in the first round of qualifying and started the race 17th. Afterwards he suggested Mercedes might start him from the pit lane in order to alter his set-up or replace his power unit, or both.Allison admitted the team discussed doing so. They changed the set-up on the other car of George Russell following his crash, which meant he had to start from the pits, but Allison said there was no reason to do the same with Hamilton’s car.
“It was an option to do what George did, to start from the pit lane having changed the set-up on his car between qualifying and the race,” said Allison in a video released by the team. “But we didn’t actually have any reason to think there was much wrong with Lewis’s set-up.
“He had his best bodywork on, he had the grid position we had, which is further up the road than starting from the pit lane. So why not start where you’d qualified even if it wasn’t the place you wished you’d qualified? So that was uppermost in our mind with respect to set-up changes.”
The team did not fit a fresh engine to either car. Allison said the financial implications of doing so under the budget cap are too high.
“If you do put another engine in here, you go to the back of the grid, [then] because of the grid place penalty start from the pit lane,” he said. “We could have priced that in.
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“But more significantly, you don’t get to just put another engine in and not pay for it financially. If your engine breaks because it’s got a problem, then the way the rules are written is that you can have another power unit at that point and it not impact your cost cap. But if you just say ‘I want one because I want one’, that’s a different matter. You have to pay for it.
“That would not have been a good trade. The freshness of a new power unit would have lifted your lap times fractionally, but the cost in cost cap hit would have not paid that worth back.”
Allison also revealed more about the technical problem which Hamilton suffered at the front-right corner of his car during the sprint race.
“Anyone who watched it on telly would have heard Lewis saying ‘I can feel it clicking’ as he as he got ready for the sprint race,” he said. “When we stripped the car after the sprint race, a race in which he struggled to get the car’s handling to be sweet-natured, we found that one of the bearings that holds one of the wishbones on had started to break up.
“That was making it move around and giving him that clicking noise, which also was associated with a bunch of inconsistency of handling, which is the main reason why he was feeling the back end of the car – even though it’s a front end problem, it translates to the car feeling loose and unpredictable, and that had an impact on his race in the sprint race.”
The part was fixed in time for qualifying, where Hamilton unexpectedly struggled and failed to reach Q2.
“We replaced that part and that problem didn’t re-emerge,” said Allison. “So it was a pain for us to have suffered that problem. Difficult for Lewis to then have the sprint race that way, but that particular thing was put to bed by quali and didn’t feature thereafter.”
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2024 United States Grand Prix
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F1statsfan (@f1statsfan)
24th October 2024, 7:51
““But more significantly, you don’t get to just put another engine in and not pay for it financially. If your engine breaks because it’s got a problem, then the way the rules are written is that you can have another power unit at that point and it not impact your cost cap. But if you just say ‘I want one because I want one’, that’s a different matter. You have to pay for it.”
Interesting – that is new information for me – that if you add an extra engine to your engine pool without an engine being damaged that the spend comes out of the cost cap.
SteveP
24th October 2024, 8:43
Not always easy to spot I suppose, I think RBR list it in the accounts as “Gourmet Sandwiches”
Señor Sjon
24th October 2024, 10:04
Perhaps that changed when Mercedes changed the engine for free every other race in 2021?
N
24th October 2024, 11:03
Yeah because no one else benefitted from those regulations back then, nooope, no one, just Merc.
Hotbottoms (@hotbottoms)
24th October 2024, 9:56
Agreed. I’m not sure about the exact rules of the budget cap, but if Allison described the engine rule accurately, it sounds like a huge loophole to me. Couldn’t a team simply set up an engine during a practice session in a way that causes it to break, allowing them to get a new, budget-cap-free engine?
spoutnik (@spoutnik)
24th October 2024, 10:28
The engine limit rule is enforced otherwise it would have no effect. All engines have seals on it and are scrutinized, that would make it pretty difficult for a team to alter the engine. Also, most teams aren’t engine constructors and have constructor’s engineers in their garage to handle the engine so that would make it even harder to do for those teams. At that point, a good rear crash in practice would be easier to achieve I think.
Kribana (@krichelle)
24th October 2024, 9:59
If you play F1 manager, you will notice that when taking a new engine. I think it is 1 or 2 million from the cost cap
MacLeod (@macleod)
24th October 2024, 7:53
I found it strange that Mercedes didn’t do this for Lewis and George. It was a no brainer todo this as they even could run the engine a mode higher for the rest of the races.
Strange I thought engines were out of the budgetcap seems I was wrong as you have to pay if your engine isn’t broken. So no (free) engines or you have to pay for it.
I didn’t knew this rule.
pcxmac (@pcxmac)
25th October 2024, 12:50
Mercedes have written Lewis off. Just look at how poorly his race engineer has performed this year. Absolute garbage. And George, well his head is next on the chopping block, I just hope he can get an ear in over at McLaren, hes much better suited there IMO. Mercedes are a trainwreck in terms of leadership, they can only float their boat by getting rules changed and by building motors many years in advance of even the public hearing about it.
Absolute frauds at this point.
Armchair Expert (@armchairexpert)
24th October 2024, 8:11
So the problem was the part between steering wheel and seat. His team mate qualified P6 and despite crashing in Q3 and having to start from the pit lane, he finished the race in the same position. Meanwhile Hamilton qualified behind the slowest car on the grid (Sauber) in P19 and spun off in absolutely embarassing way on the second lap of the race. Is this the performance of 7-time world champion and 2025 Ferrari driver?
When Max had similarly competetive car in 2017-2019 at COTA, he qualified 6th, 15th (suspension failure) and 3rd, finishing the races in 4th (starting from 16th after engine penalty and being bumped from the podium due to overtaking Raikkonen while cutting the corner), miraculous 2nd only 1s behind winning Ferrari and 3rd in 2019. Can you spot the difference in the level of performances shown in pretty much identical circumstances?
Jere (@jerejj)
24th October 2024, 10:01
I hadn’t realized such a factor of a mere engine change impacting budget cap.
Crawliin-from-the-wreckage (@davedai)
24th October 2024, 11:15
I’m probably wrong here but I think an customer
engine cost is abt. $18million or deemed by FIA to be so for cap purposes.
rprp
24th October 2024, 18:22
That’ll be for a season’s supply, for two cars.
SteveP
24th October 2024, 19:14
Four per driver
18 / (4 x 2) = 2.25 per PU (slightly less than the RBR catering budget)
Bullfrog (@bullfrog)
24th October 2024, 11:08
And definitely not “because he’s leaving.”
David BR (@david-br)
24th October 2024, 16:18
@bullfrog Quite, but then again, if so, seems a fair call on Mercedes part to basically tell Hamilton to make do with what he’s got since he won’t be around next year and they’ve better things to spend their money on.
M2X
24th October 2024, 12:10
Not getting out of Q1 isn’t a reason to think something is wrong with the setup?
lucifer (@lucifer)
24th October 2024, 12:31
exactly
The Dolphins
24th October 2024, 14:36
@M2X the setup is quite complex and thus the teams employ many engineers and much time in preparation to the race to simulate the ideal setup. This is tested in practice and data is correlated with the simulation. If this is the best setup for Lewis’ car and his driving style and their ideal race strategy then why would they gamble with a different setup? A setup change would further disturb the driver’s feel of the car on an already altered (Sprint) weekend on top of relegating him to the Pit Lane for the start.
The one thing James doesn’t mention that’s worth noting is they already had one driver who needed to start from the Pit Lane (it’s my understanding they were unable to change all parts for like models and thus failed to meet the requirements of parc ferme)– why then would they choose to have two of their cars start from the Pit Lane and battle each other on the same strategy? A better race strategy for the team is to start Lewis from the grid with a race strategy ideal for his situation; start George from the pits with a race strategy ideal for his situation; monitor and adjust to the events of the race and maximize the points potential for the day.