Toto Wolff has announced that Mercedes currently has “a few balls in the air” as it is balancing a difficult situation with its aggregates.
Lewis Hamilton has his last two systems for the year, which he has admitted are currently being maintained to get to the end of the F1 season without incurring a costly start-up penalty.
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Team-mate Valtteri Bottas has now taken five aggregates this season, including two in the last two races in Italy and Russia, the one used in Monza being “gone,” said the Finn, despite the team insisting that it be judged.
Wolff knows that Mercedes faces a delicate dilemma over future changes, particularly whether Hamilton’s W12 will require a new PU and, with it, penalties that would affect its title challenge.
Regarding Bottas’ move to Russia and the plans for the rest of the season, Wolff said: “We didn’t just change the engine as a precaution because we had the feeling that we wanted to stockpile.
“But because we want to understand the performance of the engine, and that posed a number of question marks.
“At the moment we are taking one race weekend after the other and re-evaluating the performance of the units and then making decisions. We have not yet decided which engines will go back into the pool. ”
The issues that concern Mercedes this season are not limited to the works teams, but also to partners Aston Martin and Williams and, to a lesser extent, McLaren.
Since the units are to be homologated for a period of four to five years from next season, Wolff admits that the rest of the season is crucial to understanding the system and ensuring that it will function optimally in the future.
“That’s why we have a few balls in the air,” said Wolff. “You have to have the right balance to make sure that you really sort out all the Gremlins you have with an aggregate, not just for this year but also for the aggregate for next year.
“We are definitely in a phase of assessing how things will go this season in terms of the aggregates.”
Wolff has said there is “a possibility” that a PU change could take place in Hamilton’s car in Turkey this weekend, even though no firm call has been made.
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