Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes, Circuit of the Americas, 2024
Mercedes explains decision not to give Hamilton fresh engine or change set-up
Mercedes technical director James Allison has explained why the team didn’t take advantage of Lewis Hamilton’s poor qualifying position for the United States Grand Prix to change his car’s set-up for the race or give him a fresh engine.
Hamilton was eliminated in the first round of qualifying and started the race 17th. Afterwards he suggested Mercedes might start him from the pit lane in order to alter his set-up or replace his power unit, or both.
Allison admitted the team discussed doing so. They changed the set-up on the other car of George Russell following his crash, which meant he had to start from the pits, but Allison said there was no reason to do the same with Hamilton’s car.
“It was an option to do what George did, to start from the pit lane having changed the set-up on his car between qualifying and the race,” said Allison in a video released by the team. “But we didn’t actually have any reason to think there was much wrong with Lewis’s set-up.
“He had his best bodywork on, he had the grid position we had, which is further up the road than starting from the pit lane. So why not start where you’d qualified even if it wasn’t the place you wished you’d qualified? So that was uppermost in our mind with respect to set-up changes.”
The team did not fit a fresh engine to either car. Allison said the financial implications of doing so under the budget cap are too high.
“If you do put another engine in here, you go to the back of the grid, [then] because of the grid place penalty start from the pit lane,” he said. “We could have priced that in.
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“But more significantly, you don’t get to just put another engine in and not pay for it financially. If your engine breaks because it’s got a problem, then the way the rules are written is that you can have another power unit at that point and it not impact your cost cap. But if you just say ‘I want one because I want one’, that’s a different matter. You have to pay for it.
“That would not have been a good trade. The freshness of a new power unit would have lifted your lap times fractionally, but the cost in cost cap hit would have not paid that worth back.”
Allison also revealed more about the technical problem which Hamilton suffered at the front-right corner of his car during the sprint race.
“Anyone who watched it on telly would have heard Lewis saying ‘I can feel it clicking’ as he as he got ready for the sprint race,” he said. “When we stripped the car after the sprint race, a race in which he struggled to get the car’s handling to be sweet-natured, we found that one of the bearings that holds one of the wishbones on had started to break up.
“That was making it move around and giving him that clicking noise, which also was associated with a bunch of inconsistency of handling, which is the main reason why he was feeling the back end of the car – even though it’s a front end problem, it translates to the car feeling loose and unpredictable, and that had an impact on his race in the sprint race.”
The part was fixed in time for qualifying, where Hamilton unexpectedly struggled and failed to reach Q2.
“We replaced that part and that problem didn’t re-emerge,” said Allison. “So it was a pain for us to have suffered that problem. Difficult for Lewis to then have the sprint race that way, but that particular thing was put to bed by quali and didn’t feature thereafter.”
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