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The world champion team worried about the risk of reliability failures in the final stages of the championship, they chose to equip Hamilton with a new internal combustion engine for this weekend’s Turkish Grand Prix.
Choosing to only change one component means Hamilton will get a 10-seat grid penalty rather than a drop in grid background that would have resulted from a full power unit swap.
Speaking about why Mercedes didn’t go for a complete change, the team’s track engineering director Andrew Shovlin said he felt a complete change would not have delivered the benefits. necessary to justify it.
He told Sky Sports F1: “We simulate all the races until the end of the year.
“There’s the balance and the risk of a reliability issue, and obviously the thing you sure don’t want to do is fail in the race and still have to take a penalty.
“Then there is also an element of performance because the power units lose a bit of power over the course of their life.
“The 10-seat penalty is the bit that contributes the most to this element of reliability and performance is the ICE itself, so it’s better to take 10 seats than start from behind.”
Valtteri Bottas, Mercedes W12
Photo By: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images
While Mercedes could still choose to add cooler components later this weekend, especially if Hamilton doesn’t qualify high enough on the grid, Shovlin doesn’t think it will go beyond the ICE.
“Unlikely really,” he said. “There’s a lot of pretty intrusive work when you start changing some of these things over the race weekend so we’re pretty happy with the decision we’ve made so far and that’s probably on what we’ll stick with it. “
Although Valtteri Bottas struggled to move up the order after falling off the grid in Sochi, Shovlin is hopeful Istanbul will provide better opportunities for Hamilton.
He is also aware that the world champion staged an impressive retaliation during a GP2 outing here in 2006, when he recovered from a spin that dropped him to 19th place to finish. second.
“Figuring out how easy it is to pass is actually quite difficult because you know in your own mind which tracks are good to pass,” he explained.
“Sochi had a really long straight but we were struggling with understeer and that made it difficult. But it’s a circuit, you will remember Lewis in this GP2 race where he felt there was a lot of ‘opportunities here, so that should make for an exciting Sunday. “
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