Mercedes pushing boundaries due to stable regulations

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff says his team has been pushing the boundaries of its power unit performance due to stability in the regulations.

While Mercedes has been the dominant force in F1 since the start of 2014, the team has struggled with reliability so far this season with Lewis Hamilton being hampered during qualifying at the last two races. With the V6 turbo power unit regulations now in their third year, Wolff says it becomes harder to find gains which leads to more risks being taken.

"The more the regulations stay stable the more difficult it is to find performance," Wolff said. "Andy Cowell and his team, he is Mr Performance and he is pushing the guys to extract every millisecond out of that engine.

"Because of the stable regulations it becomes more difficult and sometimes you need to push the boundaries to find the limits and maybe this is where we are at the moment, but I have no doubt this is a bunch of great engineers and great people and that we are going to solve.

"And fundamentally we have finished with a one-two [in Russia] so despite all the grey hairs in the race we still got a really brilliant result."

On Wednesday Mercedes attempted to quash conspiracy theories relating to the problems Hamilton has faced recently by explaining the reliability issues in an open letter to fans.

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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.