Hamilton’s teething problems a tough nut to crack for Mercedes
With two difficult starts in the first two Grand Prix of the season, Lewis Hamitlon's races have been rather difficult. But according to Mercedes team manager Toto Wolff, these problems may not be solved so quickly.
Lewis Hamilton experienced two catastrophic starts that cost him the chance to fight fairly for victory against his teammate Nico Rosberg.
In Australia, after a laborious start, he found himself stuck in the chasing pack before managing to climb back to second place. Worse still, in Bahrain, he was hit by Valtteri Bottas’s Williams at the first corner and only reached the third step of the podium driving a damaged car.
After the race, the Briton reflected on this incident: « I didn’t have a good start today, but it wasn’t as bad as the previous one. These are two completely different incidents, both are embarrassing, but this one even more so. In Melbourne I had a lot of wheel spin, but this time, I didn’t start as well as I should have. »
For Toto Wolff, the two incidents are unrelated and it will probably take some time to definitively resolve the issue: « We tend to believe that it is more a material problem than an electronic issue. But we cannot resolve it from one race to the next. We are working to fix this problem. The way we evaluate the clutches, the way we complete them, and the way we calibrate them. Obviously, the driver’s use must be optimized. But above all, the collaboration with Daimler aims to optimize the hardware. This takes some time. I am not yet sure when we will have results.»
