Categories: F1 News, Reports and Race ResultsMercedes

Hamilton expects future Mercedes blips

Lewis Hamilton says Mercedes is confident it will bounce back from its Singapore Grand Prix problems in Japan, but will still have similar blips in future.

Mercedes struggled for grip throughout the Singapore weekend, failing to get the most out of the soft and supersoft tyre compounds on the street circuit. With Ferrari and Red Bull comfortably beating the defending champions, Hamilton says Mercedes has been hard at work to understand the reasons behind its struggles.

"I can’t tell you what the team have come up with, but they have come up with a lot of solutions and reasons for it being the way it was," Hamilton said. "The majority of them believe at least one of the many solutions we came up with and the reasons had a domino effect. They are confident that it has been understood but they will continue to do an analysis."

Asked if he was confident there will be no repeat, Hamilton replied: "You can never say never.

"I’m not thinking it was just a fluke anything like that, at some point there are going to be situations like that, whether it’s this year, next year or the year after. But I’m hoping we have learned from that weekend and it won’t happen again.

"I believe it’s specific for Singapore and it should go back to normal."

Hamilton eventually retired from the race in Singapore due a broken clamp which led to a turbo boost leak. It was the second time in two races the team has suffered a retirement due to reliability, but Hamilton says the team will not be more conservative.

"It wouldn’t have made any difference, the thing that happened at the last race wasn’t down to performance or having the engine turned up or down, it’s just that a part failed. There was no plan to turn it up or down, we run it exactly the same way as usual.

"I had 20 races or something like that without reliability issues, which is amazing considering the amount of force and stress we put these engines through. When you consider how far they have to go with just four units, it’s amazing really."

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Andrew Lewin

Andrew first became a fan of Formula 1 during the time when Michael Schumacher and Damon Hill were stepping into the limelight after the era of Alain Prost, Nigel Mansell and Aryton Senna. He's been addicted ever since, and has been writing about the sport now for nearly a quarter of a century for a number of online news sites. He's also written professionally about GP2 (now Formula 2), GP3, IndyCar, World Rally Championship, MotoGP and NASCAR. In his other professional life, Andrew is a freelance writer, social media consultant, web developer/programmer, and digital specialist in the fields of accessibility, usability, IA, online communities and public sector procurement. He worked for many years in magazine production at Bauer Media, and for over a decade he was part of the digital media team at the UK government's communications department. Born and raised in Essex, Andrew currently lives and works in south-west London.