Williams makes changes to faulty dampers

Williams has made modifications to its dampers after suffering numerous failures during the United States Grand Prix.

Valtteri Bottas first had a failure during qualifying on Sunday morning, before later retiring with the same issue. Felipe Massa was then also told to retire his car with a damper failure, and Bottas says the team has adapted the part for the Mexican Grand Prix weekend.

"Yes, we have found the mechanical issue that took us out of the race in Austin and we’ve done the necessary modifications to the dampers, as they were the part that failed, to make sure they’re OK here," Bottas said.

"Both our cars in the race, and also for me in qualifying, broke over the bump going into Turn 11, as that was the biggest bump of the track."

While Bottas believes Williams would have been able to notice the problem during practice if it had been dry in Austin, he says there is little that could have been done at the time.

"From all the data we got in Austin, we could see we never got such big load in the dampers since the start of the season, so it was not a problem with a batch of dampers."

And Bottas says Williams is unsure how strong it will be at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez as the Mexican Grand Prix returns for the first time in 23 years.

"It’s difficult to predict how competitive we’re going to be, we’ll find out about it [during practice]. The only thing that worries me is that with the thin air we’ll have a lot more downforce than anywhere else, even less than in Monza, even running with the maximum downforce we can have.

"If that’s enough compared to some of the other teams that’s something we’ll find out. But it should be a nice challenge, there are a lot of things for the engineers to check, with the cooling of the car."

Chris Medland's Mexican Grand Prix preview

Technical analysis: United States

Scene at the United States Grand Prix

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