F1: Mercedes engines not as 'spicy' after failure

Mercedes motorsport boss Toto Wolff has revealed its Formula 1 engines are not running as "spicy" as normal in Japan, with measures in place to protect against another failure.

Mercedes has been forced to react in the wake of the unexpected blow-up of Hamilton's engine when leading last Sunday's Malaysian Grand Prix.

While a big-end bearing failure in the crankshaft was revealed to be the cause, Andy Cowell, the managing director of Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains, is conducting a thorough examination at its Brixworth, UK base.

"Within a week you are unable to properly assess all the root causes of the problem," said Wolff. "We have tried to contain it with several measures, which I can't really comment on, but it doesn't give us an ultimate guarantee and relief that we are safe for tomorrow. It's not an easy situation.

"We have put certain safety measures in place to maybe not run it as spicy as we could. But we don't know, as a fact, that this can protect the engine more. It will have an effect on lap time during the race, although the race laptime deficit is not as large as the qualifying deficit."

Wolff confirmed Cowell and his team have forensically picked apart a sister engine as it works to understand the cause of the failure.

"We get a substantial presentation every day on where they are with the analysis of the power unit, and it's in pieces and all the bits are analyzed," said Wolff. "We've also been looking at a different engine from the same build to try to find a common denominator.

"There are certain avenues we are pursuing at the moment that look interesting in terms of finding the root cause, but obviously it's only three days since they had the engine. So he [Cowell] and his team are working flat out. I get emails at the weirdest hours of the day UK time from him."

Originally on Autosport.com