03/03/2024
NEWS STORY
"It wasn't great fun," admits Toto Wolff as Mercedes and Williams suffer an engine issue which cost around 0.5s a lap.
Having made a great start and subsequently passed Charles Leclerc for second, George Russell was just settling down and preparing to shadow Max Verstappen when he was warned that rising engine temperatures meant he would have to lift and coast.
His teammate, who was already reporting a loose seat, had a similar problem. Further down the field, the Williams pair were also reporting similar issues, Logan Sargeant additionally encountering an electronics problem on his steering wheel which at one point looked to have ended his race.
"Testing was pretty good," said Wolff at race end. "Also, the performances on Thursday and on Friday were encouraging, the car was stable, it was good. The drivers like it.
"When we started the race on the soft tyre, everything pretty much was to plan," he continued. "Then, unfortunately, we had to start pulling the engine more than we expected. We can't understand yet where that came from.
"We have one of our customer teams, Williams, who had the same issue," he admitted. "The other two not. That was unexpected."
Russell managed to hold off Lando Norris for fifth, while teammate Lewis Hamilton was further four seconds behind in seventh, with Alex Albon 15th and Sargeant a distant 19th.
"If you switch 0.3-4s of power unit performance off, then you have to lift-and-coast on top," said Wolff, "so I think at times probably altogether it was 5 or 6 tenths of a second that we couldn't take from what the car had in it. Therefore, it just wasn't great fun.
"At times, we were literally not a few degrees, but like 10 degrees running over what we thought we should be," he revealed. "I think, even without traffic, at the beginning, we were already over the limit.
"We don't know because we pretty much run the same cooling levels than on the long runs we did in the days before. It just spiked more than we thought.
"I don't believe that any other team opened the car more than they did before," he added, referring to cooling vents. "So, it's a thing that was probably more with us."
"I made a really good start, got into second and I was like 'here we go'," said Russell. "Then suddenly I had these big red alarms on my steering wheel.
"We both faced a similar problem," he continued. "For whatever reason we had massive engine overheating and the battery wasn't working properly. I had no battery left. I had to turn the power down, we were losing four-tenths a lap in power.
"It was so difficult holding them off," he sighed. "I was surprised we managed to do it for the first ten laps or so. We just went backwards thereafter. It's a shame we didn't get to show any real potential with this car, a bit of a strange day."
"For a while my battery was dead," added Hamilton. "Down the straights I was just de-rating the whole way down the straights, so I lost a lot of ground to the McLarens.
"I was fixing that out and that took a good 10 laps and I lost 15 seconds through that," he continued. "After that I was just trying to get back on it and catch up. Once we got that fixed there was a bit of overheating with the brakes and in general the performance was so-so...
"Then my seat started moving, it clicked and my left side dropped so it was moving through the braking zones. Not great.
"I feel good, I don't feel downbeat," he insisted. "It was a super-average race, I was catching at the end and feeling racy, but the gap was so big and I'd lost so much at the beginning of the race.
"We have a platform that we can start adding bricks to," he continued. "The last couple of years, we've had all these problems and spent several races trying to undo all those problems, trying to figure out what those problems were as opposed to now. Now it's a building process from here, and I think we're a great team."
Check out our Saturday gallery from Bahrain here.