Mercedes customer teams appear to be in the dark as to when they will receive upgraded engines.

The upgraded units appeared in the works cars at Monza, and whilst a component failure meant Nico Rosberg was forced to revert to the previous spec unit for the race - which ultimately failed three laps from the chequered flag - teammate Lewis Hamilton's utter domination throughout the weekend suggests the German team used its seven remaining tokens wisely.

However, Mercedes three customer teams, Williams, Force India and Lotus have yet to learn when they will have access to the upgraded units, a situation further complicated by the fact that an upgraded fuel is required and the need to fit the new engines in to their planned usage cycle.

We haven't been promised anything at this point," Bob Fernley told Motorsport.com. "It's a Mercedes decision really.

"The original decision was this wouldn't come out until 2016," he admitted, "the fact that it's come out now, they may want to extend it to the customer teams. It depends what the directive is from Mercedes. I think the answer is to find out from Mercedes what they want to do, and then we'll adjust our programme. It just depends where are are in the schedules. We lost an engine with Nico Hulkenberg, so he's a bit out of sync, but then Nico missed the race in Spa. So we need to look at the whole picture of where we are with engines."

Naturally, Williams and Lotus are equally keen to get their hands on the new unit which, like its predecessor, appears to have the measure of the improved Ferrari engine.

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READERS COMMENTS

1. Posted by Tweek, 14/09/2015 17:37

"Does the contract say that they must provide equivalent spec engines to customers that they use themselves? Seems like a sound business decision to keep the competition behind the works teams. Bad racing, but good business........ At least in the short term"

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2. Posted by scf1fan, 14/09/2015 16:44

"A can of worms!! If tokens are for in season upgrades to the existing spec engine, coming out with what is an admittedly new spec engine (2016!) with limited availability is problematic for all involved. In part because every team (using that engine) does not have access to that same spec! (And an engine that needs a new formulation of fuel would certainly seem like it was more than just an in season upgrade.) IMHO . . . "

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Customer teams wait on Mercedes upgrade

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