Although some teams planned to run the latest gensets today, others had to deviate from their original plans.
The move is understood as a response to the problem Lewis Hamilton suffered in Friday’s FP2 session when his car lost power and the F1 World Champion was ordered to stop on the track.
As a precautionary measure, Mercedes has made sure that all eight of its cars from the Factory, McLaren, Aston Martin and Williams teams use the lowest-duty engine for the remainder of the Zandvoort event while the Hamilton failure is investigated.
At this stage of the season, teams usually switch gensets at the end of the first day of running anyway, after using the remaining mileage allocation on the oldest “Friday” examples.
On this occasion, those who still had a choice were asked to switch to the units in the pool with the lowest duty cycle.
The meaning is that some teams saved the least used aggregates for the high demands of Monza and the Italian GP next weekend.
Hamilton, Valtteri Bottas, Daniel Ricciardo, Lance Stroll and Nicholas Latifi all took new engines with them at the start of the Belgian GP weekend, but since the race did not go to full distance these engines are still very fresh. Lando Norris also picked up a new one at Spa, but it was involved in his qualifying accident and has not yet returned to his engine pool.
However, Sebastian Vettel’s car was forced to have two engine changes in Zandvoort.
Lance Stroll, Aston Martin AMR21, Sebastian Vettel, Aston Martin AMR21 and Valtteri Bottas, Mercedes W12, on the grid at the end of FP2
Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images
Vettel’s first engine, which was supposed to come out at the end of the day anyway, failed during FP1, resulting in a long red flag.
Another well-used engine was then installed for the FP2, which ran without any problems, so it would normally have stayed in the car for the rest of the weekend.
But after the Hamilton issue that evening, Aston Martin had to make another change and fit in the German’s youngest available engine to be kept in reserve for Monza.
