Toto Wolff: Lewis Hamilton Could Take Grid Penalty in Istanbul
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Lewis Hamilton
With only 7 races to go, neither Mercedes nor red Bull and their respective lead drivers could afford a slip-up. However the boss of the Brackley-based team has confirmed that the seven-time world champion could take a new engine ahead of the start of the Turkish Grand Prix. With Hamilton already on his third engine, the remaining seven races could witness him taking a fourth.
In terms of when he would take the penalty, Mercedes have not given anything away with Wolff previously saying the decision will be made “spontaneously”. Race fans would be aware that both Valtteri Bottas and Max Verstappen endured respective grid penalties when they took a new power unit before the Russian Grand Prix.
Toto Wolff on Lewis Hamilton Taking a Grid Penalty
“At the moment, we go through it race by race and see how the performance and durability of the engine develops,” the team principal told RTL. “If we do switch power units, it will happen spontaneously. We would have just as much of a disadvantage as Red Bull had at Sochi.”
“It’s a possibility. When and how is not yet decided,” Toto Wolff told Sky Sports. “Most important is that you don’t DNF because of a reliability issue. You can cope with swings – whether you finish second, third, I think that’s okay, the championship will go long. But if you don’t finish. So we are looking at the parameters of the engines, making sure we don’t suffer from any reliability problems.”
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Yakshpat Bhargava
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