© Steve Etherington for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff says the team is using engines with less power at the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, for reliability reasons.
Wolff confirms that Mercedes turned the power of their power unit down a bit during the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix weekend, which might have played a part in Mercedes losing out on a pole position for the first time in 2020.
The team had to do this due to concerns over MGU-K related problems that were experienced by Mercedes’ customer teams Williams and Racing Point.
“We took a little bit of power, a little bit of performance out of all the Mercedes engines,” Toto Wolff said to Motorsport-Total.com.
“We have a gremlin in there. The damage to the MGU-K occurred below the mileage it is normally supposed to last. And we do not yet understand exactly why.”
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Wolff adds that Hamilton and Bottas’ performance in qualifying wasn’t influenced just by the engine.
“We didn’t get the soft tyre right. That’s an outlier. The overall gap to the field is much smaller than we would have liked and we have to learn from that now.
“We can’t say exactly what it is yet. We did quite well on the medium. The tyre suited us much better than the soft. But we were also very strong on the soft this year.
“You have to analyse the data, but we are not there yet,” concluded the Austrian.
