The world champion outfit faces a difficult end to the 2021 campaign as it juggles concerns about the durability of its internal combustion engines (ICE).
Valtteri Bottas is already on his sixth ICE of the season and will be serving another five-place penalty at today’s United States Grand Prix.
Mercedes says there are no guarantees that Lewis Hamilton will end the season without finishing fifth after serving a 10-place penalty last time at the Turkish Grand Prix.
While that would trigger another start drop for the Briton, Mercedes’s biggest concern is that an engine failure in one race could ruin their F1 title hopes completely.
The reliability situation at Mercedes is one of the most difficult since the beginning of the turbo-hybrid era in 2014 and comes after the departure of the former Mercedes High Performance Powertrains boss Cowell last year.
The key architect of the Mercedes World Cup successes has been replaced by Hywel Thomas, who has been with the Mercedes engine team since 2004.
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There have been suggestions that Cowell’s absence made the Mercedes fights worse, but team principal Toto Wolff insists that is not the case.
Regarding the situation in Austin, Wolff said: “The strength of the organization lies in its depth.
“Andy is clearly an extraordinary person who helped make it happen in his day, but so does Hywel and everyone but him. I have 100 percent confidence in the structure we have today.
Toto Wolff, Mercedes AMG F1 Director Motorsport and Andy Cowell, Managing Director, Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
“Engine developments don’t happen overnight. It has a long lead time if something goes right or wrong.
“Andy has been a big part of our past success, but so have Hywel and everyone else. So I don’t think any of the executives decided to leave the organization.
“They are still really great strengths within the organization.”
Despite the trust in the current engine division of Mercedes, Wolff admitted at the beginning of the Austin weekend that it was going through a difficult time – especially because it supplied three customer teams in McLaren, Aston Martin and Williams as well as its own factory services.
“I think you can see we are certainly suffering this year,” he said.
“We’re going to the sixth engine – I think it’s for Valtteri – and we didn’t choose.
“On the contrary, we are really trying to get the problems under control and we don’t quite understand it yet.
“I think we’ve come a step closer now, so it’s not that we’re literally always easy with the engines. We are committed to supplying all customers, and that is not trivial. “
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