Mercedes Explain Decision To Have Hamilton Start From Pit Lane In Baku
F1
Andrew Shovlin explained Mercedes's reasoning behind choosing Lewis Hamilton to start the 2024 Azerbaijan Grand Prix from the pit lane.
After the seven-time World Champion qualified in P7 during the most recent race weekend in Baku, his team decided to replace his entire power unit, which meant he had to start the race from the pit lane.
Starting from the back, Lewis Hamilton knew it would be a tough weekend. Still, despite overheating tires and problems with "one of the worst balances," he managed to score a P9 (gaining two positions after Sergio Perez and Carlos Sainz collided).
But why did the German team decide to change Hamilton's power unit in Baku? Mercedes's trackside engineering director, Andrew Shovlin, answered this question in the latest Grand Prix debrief.
Shovlin said it was clear to Mercedes for a long time that Hamilton would have to get a new power unit at some point in the season after he lost one in Australia due to failure.
"So, we'd been aware for a long time that we were going to have to try and get another power unit into the pool in order to be able to complete the season without risk of one failing during a race, which you definitely don't want that to happen. So the question was, where do we do it?"
"Now, you wouldn't normally have taken a pit lane start from a P7 grid position because there'd be a decent opportunity to score points, but one of the factors for us is we've sort of drifted back a bit in terms of our performance recently."
In other words, given the Mercedes car's current speed, the team knew Hamilton would not be able to make much progress unless something very unexpected happened.
In addition, Shovlin revealed that the Mercedes F1 team has a big upgrade package prepared for the 2024 United States Grand Prix (which follows after Singapore).
With hopes that this upgrade could allow their drivers to battle for podiums and perhaps even race wins again, the team decided to replace the power unit in Baku while the chances of such results were still low.
"But, in the near future, we've got a good update kit coming. We're hoping that will put us back into a better situation."
"What we'd wanted to do was really get the pain of that pit lane start out of the way before we've got a car that hopefully can get back to challenging for podiums on merit."
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