Mercedes yet to identify cause of Hamilton failure

Mercedes is still investigating what caused Lewis Hamilton's power unit to fail when he was leading the Malaysian Grand Prix.

Having led the race from pole position, Hamilton retired from a commanding lead with 16 laps remaining at Sepang as his power unit failed on the pit straight. The problem - coupled with Nico Rosberg's third place - saw Hamilton drop 23 points behind his team-mate in the championship standings with five races to go this season.

Mercedes executive director (technical) Paddy Lowe says work is still ongoing to try and understand what caused the failure and prevent a repeat in future.

"Malaysia was a bitter pill to swallow," Lowe said. "We let Lewis down in a big way. We are continuing to investigate the issue with his engine are doing everything we can to ensure that it is first understood and then contained for the remainder of the season."

However, Lowe does not see any major damage for Hamilton beyond the retirement, saying he is now on an equal footing with Rosberg in terms of power unit availability.

"As it stands, despite the failure of this engine, Lewis now has the same stock of Power Units as Nico for the remaining five races - including used Power Units which he can fit for free practice sessions. So, hopefully there will be no further impact to his programme."

Hamilton had gained an extra power unit compared to Rosberg when taking a number of power unit penalties during the Belgian Grand Prix weekend, with extra components required due to a number of reliability problems earlier in the season.

Technical snapshot - Malaysia

2016 Malaysian Grand Prix - Quotes of the week

F1i's driver ratings for the 2016 Malaysian Grand Prix

Breakfast with... Gianni Morbidelli

Keep up to date with all the F1 news via Facebook and Twitter

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.