Mercedes announced in Austin on Friday that Bottas had needed a third fresh engine in four races, which left the Finn with a starting penalty of five places.
Mercedes customers Williams and Aston Martin also had to bring fresh engines for George Russell and Sebastian Vettel this weekend. Both will start the race from the end of the grid.
It comes after Mercedes F1 boss Wolff revealed in Turkey that the manufacturer is working to understand a problem with its engines and contain the problem for the remainder of the season after Lewis Hamilton suffered a start drop and started in eleventh .
Wolff said in an interview with Sky Sports on the Friday after FP1 at the Circuit of The Americas that Mercedes is dealing with “some reliability issues that keep coming up”.
“I think we understand a lot better what it is now,” said Wolff. “But it does mean there is no shelf life to operate them, and that means that there may be a DNF risk to it.”
In a subsequent speech at the FIA press conference on Friday, Wolff explained how Mercedes is working to understand the problem to also ensure that its customer teams are not affected.
“I think you can see that we are reliably suffering this year,” said Wolff during the FIA press conference in Austin on Friday.
“We’re going to the sixth engine, I think it’s for Valtteri and we didn’t go for it.
“But on the contrary, we are really trying to get the problems under control, and we did not get it [them] fully.
“I think we are now one step closer so it is not always that we are literally easy with the engines.
“We are committed to supplying all customers, and that is not trivial.”
Wolff mentioned a suggestion in the Sky interview that it was due to the air valves on the engine, “bullshit”, but “for obvious reasons” shied away from expanding the problem at the press conference.
Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W12
Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images
He admitted that the topic was “always a concern” given the tight title fights Mercedes is in this year. Hamilton is six points behind Max Verstappen in the drivers’ standings, six races before the end of the season.
“I think if you look at Monza for example, Valtteri had to start from the back and we lose points along the way,” said Wolff.
“We try to improve every year, and this year we’ve got to a point where it has cost us points. For the past seven or eight years, that attitude has earned us races and championships.
“So I would have hoped for a few fewer penalties and fewer engines, but this year it hit us really hard.
“McLaren and Aston Martin are luckier and in that regard we just have to get it going and do the best possible job.”
McLaren’s Zak Brown said the team had no concerns about the reliability of its customer engines and said Mercedes had “worked extremely hard”.
“There’s a lot of competition so if you push, reliability will always be a challenge,” said Brown.
“But from a McLaren perspective, I have to say we are very happy. They have an incredible track record, so we are not worried.”
The post Mercedes “reliably suffers” from F1 engines first appeared on monter-une-startup.
