Mercedes still does not know the reason for Hamilton’s retirement

On the seventeenth lap of the Australian Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton retired from fighting in the race due to an engine failure. Mercedes technical director James Allison said the team still does not know what caused the fault.

James Ellison: “We don’t know the reason. The power stations are sent back to Brixworth and the boys will find out what went wrong.

All we know now are the symptoms, which were a rapid drop in oil pressure, which shut down the engine to protect it from further damage. In a situation where such a catastrophic pressure drop occurs, the best thing that can be done to save the engine is to turn it off right here and now.

And then we get not a pile of molten metal, but an engine, having studied it, we will learn a series of proofs that will tell us the reason. And we can use this knowledge in the future.

As I said, we don’t know the cause yet, but it will be determined in Brixworth soon. And as soon as we know, we will take all measures to repair other engines to minimize the chance of the problem recurring.”

But during the stage in Australia, Mercedes engineers were able to identify the car’s weaknesses and conclude that the W15 is not suitable for hot weather.

“After the third practice session before qualifying we did not change the settings as we felt the car was in the optimal range, which was evident from the session results,” continues Allison. “We are already starting to see a pattern: in most stages there is a period where we are happy with the car and confident in it, but in the decisive sessions, in qualifying and in the race, the speed slips through our fingers. .

When we analyzed this pattern, we found that our competitiveness decreased as the track warmed up during the hottest part of the day, and along with the track temperature, tire temperatures increased.

We already showed our best times during cool weather sessions. This gives us some clues about what we need to do moving forward.”