Lowe scoffs at Hamilton conspiracy theorists

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Mercedes executive director Paddy Lowe says "anyone with an ounce of intelligence" knows the team is not sabotaging Lewis Hamilton's car.

Hamilton retired from the lead of the Malaysian Grand Prix on Sunday, resulting in Nico Rosberg extending his championship lead to 23 points. With Hamilton having had a number of power failures this season, immediately following the race he said: "I just can't believe that only my engines are the ones that have been going this year. Something just doesn't feel right, but there's nothing I can do about it."

The comments led to a section of fans speculating the failures could have been a result of Mercedes sabotaging Hamilton's car, but when asked if a team could do so, Lowe firmly rejected the notion.

"I can’t agree with you that the driver hinted that there was sabotage. Lewis has been very clear, certainly with us, that that’s out of the question.

"Anyone with an ounce of intelligence analysing this situation would realise the prospect of us designing a system that would cause a big-end bearing to fail at that precise point in a race… If we were that good we would win everything and control everything at every point. We’ve had other failures in the year which were unfortunate.

"If we were good enough to arrange such sabotage we wouldn’t have any failures. I think it’s a very, very tough business, Formula One, the engineering is operating right at the boundary of performance and therefore things do go wrong. The complexity is incredible and so to engineer something to happen on purpose on a car…

"It’s similar to when people say to us ‘you favour one driver over another’, and the idea we might give better equipment to one driver over another. If we’ve invented something that makes our car quicker of course we want it in both cars because we want to win the race. So we never hold back or would even contemplate it, even if we could engineer it, which we couldn’t, so I think anyone intelligent can work all of that out."

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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.