Mercedes forced to ditch Hamilton’s Australian GP engine

Mercedes has retired from Lewis Hamilton’s pool of hardware his Australian GP engine after a terminal issue was diagnosed on the unit that caused the Briton’s DNF in Melbourne.

Mercedes was unable to conclude in Australia the reasons for the engine’s sudden shutdown on lap 15 of the race, but after the unit was shipped back to the team’s HPP base in Brixworth the terminal nature of the issue became evident.

The Brackley squad traced the cause of the failure to a bottom-end issue stemming from a quality control problem rather than a design flaw.

While this means that the breakdown was likely a one-off problem, losing one of his four allocated engines so early in the season will force Hamilton to rely on an extra unit at some point, likely in the second half of his campaign, which will imply a grid penalty.

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Adding insult to injury, this engine failure is just one piece of a bigger puzzle for Mercedes as the outfit’s W15 silver arrow hasn't delivered to its drivers the performance boost they expected.

However, despite these early setbacks, Hamilton remains optimistic on Mercedes’ prospects.

“I think it's all about perspective,” the Briton said ahead of this weekend’s Japanese GP.

“I think for us, of course, we've not started the season where we wanted to be but we've got a long way to go.

“You've seen in the past, last year, for example, just how things can switch in certain teams - looking like Aston, [and] McLaren last year, who started on the back foot. Anything can happen in the sport.

“I think we've just got to learn as much as we can, take as much as we can from the data, remain positive, continue to work hard. And I would say it's not how you fall, it's how you get up.

“We're just going to continue to chase and fight and hopefully we can be fighting at the front at some stage.”

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