Lewis Hamilton qualified seventh last weekend at the Azerbaijan Grand Prix but ended up starting from the pit lane as Mercedes dropped a new power unit into his car
Mercedes have teased a “bigger” car upgrade to come and explained the decision to make Lewis Hamilton take a grid penalty in Baku last weekend.
Hamilton had struggled in qualifying but still managed to go seventh quickest. And trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin admits that a team would not ordinarily consider making changes to a car in that position that would lead to a pit lane start.
But that was exactly what Mercedes elected to do on Sunday. They decided to bring new engine components into Hamilton’s pool for the season which went beyond his normal allowance, incurring the grid drop.
Looking ahead to the rest of the season, Shovlin explained in a video published by the team that it felt like the ideal time to pull the trigger having suffered a setback in that area earlier in the year. He said: “The situation with Lewis really starts back in Melbourne when we lost a very young power unit with a failure.
“We’d been aware for a long time that we were going to have to try and get another power unit into the pool in order to be able to complete the season without risk of one failing during a race which you definitely don’t want that to happen. So the question was, where do we do it?
“Now, you wouldn’t normally have taken a pit lane start from a P7 grid position because there’d be decent opportunity to score points but one of the factors for us is we’ve sort of drifted back a bit in terms of our performance recently but in the near future we’ve got a good update kit coming.
“We’re hoping that that will put us back into a better situation and what we’d wanted to do was really get the pain of that pit lane start out of the way before we’ve got a car that hopefully can get back to challenging for podiums on merit. So that was the real thinking.”
Mercedes are planning upgrades for next month’s United States Grand Prix (
AFP via Getty Images)
Unless he suffers another loss from his engine pool between now and the end of the year, Hamilton should not need to take any further grid drops for that reason. And, as for the upgrade he teased, Shovlin said Mercedes fans can expect to see it on their cars at next month’s United States Grand Prix.
He added: “That’s now behind us so we are looking forward to the rest of the season and certainly in Lewis’ case he should have good, reliable, powerful Mercedes engine for the remaining races. The spec of the car is always evolving, we’re always trying to bring performance every race.
“But, at the moment our main focus is on bringing a bigger package to Austin, then we get into the final six races of the year and there will be smaller things beyond that but that’s certainly what we’re working for at the moment is a bigger update to the car at the Austin race.”