According to team boss Toto Wolff
It looked for a while as if Mercedes were going to use the same tactic as a divorced parent with disgruntled children: throwing money at it until the problem goes away. For Brazil, Lewis Hamilton got a new engine that gave him enough power to drive into first place. Due to wear, such an engine is already less powerful in a second race and an expensive tactic would be to put a new engine in the car for the last three races.
Lewis would get a grid penalty, but he would also have enough power to compensate for it. All F1 teams are only allowed to spend a certain amount per season, but the engines (which would cost around 10 million dollars) are outside that budget. Robert Doornbos told TopGear about this that they would have the fastest engine anyway, but that it does entail a risk. Overtaking is not always easy.
Hamilton won’t get a new engine again
Toto Wolff now says Hamilton will not get a new engine again. Next race he will simply race the current bike again. As a result, he will not receive any grid penalties, but the extra power will probably be slightly less than last week. That does not mean that the engine will be slow; the Mercedes engine is and remains supreme. In addition, the other engines are also a race older.
“With every engine, performance decreases. That means that although we will race the bike until the end of the season, we will definitely lose performance,” Wolff told Motorsport.com. He adds: ‘We will continue with this engine until the end of the season. We still have questions about reliability, but we hope we got the right answers, and we’re going to the end.” Hopefully this message is more reliable than the Mercedes on-board radios.
