“That should make for an exciting Sunday”– Mercedes hope Lewis Hamilton recreates his GP2 masterclass in Turkey this Sunday.
Mercedes’ superstar Lewis Hamilton will serve a 10-place grid penalty after his team implants a new internal combustion engine (ICE) for the race in Turkey.
Giving Max Verstappen a massive mileage over Hamilton in the grid positions and could potentially serve as a game-changer in the over championship race.
Seeing the threat imposed with the recent sanction, Mercedes hope Hamilton manages to pull his GP2 masterclass; in 2006, the Briton climbed from 16th to finish second in a 23-lap GP2 race which featured no Safety Car periods.
“Working out how easy it is to overtake is actually quite hard,” Andrew Shovlin told Sky. “You know in your own mind which are the tracks that are good for passing. Sochi, though, has got a very long straight but we were struggling a bit with understeer, which made it tricky.”
“But this is a circuit – remember Lewis in that GP2 race – he felt there was a lot of opportunity here, that should make for an exciting Sunday.”
Prevention of a failure
Shovlin claims that Mercedes decided to change Hamilton’s engine and incur penalty roots out of the feeling that a lack of such a move would have ended his campaign in Turkey into a DNF.
“We’re simulating all the races to the end of the year,” he said. “There’s a balance of the risk of a reliability issue. Obviously, the thing that you definitely don’t want to do is fail during a race and then have to take a penalty anyway.
“Then there’s also a performance element because the power units do lose a bit of horsepower over their life. The 10 place penalty is the bit that most contributes to that reliability element and the performance is the ICE itself.”
“And it’s better to take 10 places than start from the back.”
