Austrian admits team are pushing the limits further than before
Thursday 19 May 2016 11:41, UK
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has vowed the team will "sort it out" after more unreliability problems for both of their cars in Russia.
Lewis Hamilton was forced to miss Q3 in Sochi after a recurrence of his power unit problem from China and then suffered a loss of water pressure during the race.
In the sister car, eventual race winner Nico Rosberg developed an MGU-K problem which led Wolff to fear they would have to retire the car.
"I have no doubt this is a group of great engineers and people and we are going to sort it," Wolff said.
"Fundamentally we have finished one and two so with all the grey hair we had during the race we still got a really brilliant result."
With their advantage over the chasing pack not as big as in previous season, the Silver Arrows boss concedes part of the reason for their increased reliability problems could be that they taking more risks than normal.
"The longer the regulations stay stable the more difficult it is to find performance. As you know Andy Cowell and his team, he is 'Mr Performance', and he is pushing his guys to extract every millisecond out of that engine," said Wolff.
"Because of the stable regulations it becomes more difficult and you need to push the boundaries sometimes in order to find the limits and maybe this is where we are at the moment."
Despite the water pressure problem, Hamilton was able to continue to the chequered flag at a reduced pace and salvage second place.
However, there could be worse news to come with Mercedes fearing the engine could have been damaged by the problem during the race.
"We need to analyse that the water pressure started to drop, then stabilised, then continued to drop, but it could be that the engine got a large slap and we need to find out if we can keep it in the pool or not," admitted Wolff.
Mercedes chartered a flight to bring new parts to Sochi to avoid triggering a grid penalty for Hamilton following his Saturday problems, and Wolff revealed F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone played a key role in the world champion being able to start the race.
"It was a team effort from many people. Niki Lauda tried to organise the plane and the slot and we had various options at certain stages and had to choose which one would come in earliest," he said.
"Paddy [Lowe]'s assistant Nicole, who happens to be Russian, sorted out the airport and we got the plane, got the bit on the plane, got the guy on the plane and Bernie sorted the customs. The details were that the plane landed and within 90 seconds the box was in the car and on the way to the track so I don't want to know how he sorted that. He played a huge role in making Lewis start."
