With just weeks to go until pre-season testing in Bahrain, Mercedes has revealed that it is facing power unit “issues”, though they remain confident their engines will be running smoothly for the first grand prix weekend.
Mercedes-AMG High Performance Powertrains managing director Hywel Thomas said they are doing everything possible to make sure their 2021-spec engine will be reliable and competitive.
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“In terms of readiness, we’ve got plenty of engines in build at the moment getting ready for the new season,” Thomas said.
“We have already got some of them together and we have also got engines running on the dynos right now, doing their durability runs.
“There are also engines for our customers too, which are already with them and either in the back of their chassis and fired up or in the process of doing so.
“We have got some issues with the power units. We know we have issues but we have plenty of plans in place to fix all of those issues. I’m sure it will all be ready for the first race.
“The winter is always a challenging time for us as we prepare for a new season, and this year there have been a few extra additional things thrown at us.
“It’s been the first winter when we’ve had to react to a change to the regulations, which limits the amount of dyno hours we are able to run.
“This means we have to make every single dyno run count and must make sure we are entirely productive, to learn about the performance and the reliability of the power unit during each hour.”
Continuing, Thomas noted the additional challenge of not being able to incrementally upgrade their engine during the season:
“Also, it’s the first winter when we have prepared for only one single upgrade for the whole season.
“So we have to get all of our performance into the first PU that goes to the first race, whereas in previous seasons we have been able to split that up into different packages for each PU that gets introduced.
“With that challenge, we have to get absolutely everything there for the first race and make sure it’s completely reliable.
“Also, there are more races this season and the same number of power units, which means each individual power unit needs to run across more races. We just have to make sure we are ready for that and focus even more on reliability.
“We also have the challenge of a pretty short winter as we didn’t finish racing until the middle of December and now we are straight back into it. So, if anything, we’ve had more to do and less time to do it in,” he added.
Mercedes will be chasing their eighth consecutive Drivers’ and Constructors’ title in 2021, as they look to continue their domination of the turbo-hybrid era of Formula One.
The Silver Arrows have had the strongest, most efficient power unit for the majority of this era, and they’ll be hoping to maintain this trend next season.
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