Mercedes knows it cannot afford non-finishes in a "regular, continued way" if it's to see off the increased championship threat from Ferrari this Formula 1 season.
Kimi Antonelli and George Russell have both lost big chunks of points to race-ending mechanical failures, which has left Mercedes (via Antonelli) with a 41-point advantage in the drivers' championship and a 72-point constructors' championship lead, both of which should be bigger.
"I'm underwhelmed," said team principal Toto Wolff after Mercedes' reliability let it down again at Barcelona, as Antonelli retired from second place late on.
"You can't DNF cars in a kind of regular, continued way. Losing 25 points in a constructors' championship [fight] in Montreal and losing another 18 points today.
"In order to finish first, first you have to finish. Reliability, this is what we need to get on top of. That's number one."
How is reliability really affecting the title race? Well, Mercedes has, by our calculations, lost more points than any of the other top four teams.
There is no perfect way to measure points lost to reliability. After all, you never know how a race will play out if that individual continues in the race. Monaco is the trickiest to unpack with all the penalties there.
There's no definitive way of saying where a driver would have finished without a mechanical problem, but we've gone for the cleanest (if imperfect) method of counting the position they were in when their race-ending problems struck.
That does lead to scenarios in which Lando Norris and Max Verstappen are both credited with eight points lost from China because they both retired (or in Norris's case, didn't start) from sixth place.
But it still paints a good picture of which teams and drivers have lost the most points among the top four teams.
Points lost to reliability issues (team)
Mercedes: 43
Red Bull: 36
McLaren: 30
Ferrari: 10
Points lost to reliability issues (driver)
Verstappen: 26
Russell: 25
Norris: 20
Antonelli: 18
Hadjar: 10
Leclerc: 10
Piastri: 10
Hamilton: 0
Hamilton is the clear winner there, and that's partly why he was already second in the drivers' championship before his Barcelona win, coupled with his strong return to form.
Russell would point to issues in Shanghai qualifying costing him pole position (and a clearer route to the victory that Antonelli instead took) as seven more points lost but, without a parallel universe, we'll never know if he'd have taken pole.
What's going wrong for Mercedes?
A thorough investigation into Russell's Montreal failure hasn't really started yet - because his battery is still floating on sea freight somewhere between Montreal and Mercedes' Brackley base.
"We got the car back [to the garage in Montreal] and were able to get the module out of it. It had to undergo some unusual safety procedures and then has to be shipped back actually to the UK," Mercedes deputy team principal Bradley Lord said on the team's own podcast earlier this month.
"So it will therefore be several months before the hardware gets back and we need to really dig through the data to understand exactly what went wrong and then work out how we try and prevent a repeat on any of the other modules in the future."
The complex electrical nature of the battery means it's not the easiest thing to send via air freight.
Whether a similar issue caused Antonelli's Barcelona retirement isn't yet known.
"We don't know yet what was the cause of the failure," Wolff said on Sunday at Barcelona.
"Most of the others were battery-related. But different failures. It was not always the same.
"So we need to understand what it was. But clearly the symptom was quite similar with the car, like George in Montreal, where the car just switched off.
"We will be really digging deep to make sure that this doesn't happen again."
It was two unrelated battery failures that meant neither of Mercedes customer McLaren's cars could start the Chinese Grand Prix, while a different power unit issue ended Norris's Monaco GP. It was McLaren's gearbox failing that caused Norris's retirement from Montreal.
The team has had to break the Friday night curfew two weekends running, in Monaco and at Barcelona, in order to remedy reliability issues for the rest of those events.
The other customers, Williams and Alpine, have both had their problems too, but Mercedes and McLaren have suffered the most in terms of losing points-paying positions.
And Mercedes knows that's worrying for its title ambitions, with Ferrari's Barcelona upgrade seemingly eroding some of Mercedes' previous clear performance advantage.
"You see a DNF robs you of 25 points and it's wide open," Wolff said of the title race.
"That's why we can't afford to not finish. We need to just keep putting performance on the car and power unit, not make mistakes, be clever with the strategy and stay absolutely on it."
from The Race https://ift.tt/9NH6AOd
No comments: