(Motorsport-Total.com) – “We cannot afford regular or repeated failures,” said Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff after the Formula 1 race in Barcelona. World championship leader Kimi Antonelli had retired there due to a defect, after the Mercedes W17 of teammate George Russell had also rolled out just two races earlier in Canada.
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“We will leave no stone unturned,” Wolff had announced in Spain, and meanwhile they have indeed tracked down the series of failures at Mercedes. “I believe that most risk areas have now been identified,” reveals technical director James Allison in the Mercedes podcast Silver Arrows Radio Show.
Allison clarifies that the problems Mercedes had with the power unit this year are “not all identical.” However, the defects “have their origin more or less in the same rough area of the battery,” says the Brit.
Not only the Mercedes factory team struggled with problems this year, but the customer teams, especially McLaren, were also affected. For example, in China, neither Lando Norris nor Oscar Piastri could start. Here too, there were (different) problems with the battery.
Allison now emphasizes that these difficulties should be resolved “with a bit of luck” “when we start to gradually introduce the new modules.” However, this also means that the problems can only be completely solved by changing the battery.
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“This is of course an important matter for us. These failures are very, very painful,” stresses Allison. He explains: “You have to accept that there will also be defects. We try to ensure that these defects happen during test drives or on test benches.”
They want to achieve that the difficulties “occur as rarely as possible when you are out there collecting championship points,” he emphasizes. This was only partially successful for Mercedes at the start of the new Formula 1 regulations this year.
At least now they are confident to have found the origin of the problems.
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