The legend of the unbeatable and above all indestructible Mercedes may really have come to an end. In a point-to-point championship, both in the drivers ‘and constructors’ standings, against Max Verstappen and Red Bull, Brackley’s battleship discovered that it had become worryingly very fragile. The Achilles heel of the reigning seven-time world champions, now forced into the role of pursuers, is there power unit. Or rather, its reliability. The penalties on the grid accumulated by the Mercedes-powered teams are no longer counted, but the biggest problem concerns the official team of the Star’s house.
Valtteri Bottas has made up for setbacks on the grid in three of the last five GPs. Lewis Hamilton was forced to serve ten penalty positions in Istanbul. But the real drama – on a sporting level, of course – for Toto Wolff and associates is that the fragility shown by the V6 built at Brixworth does not seem to be resolvable between now and the end of the season. It is no coincidence that even at Interlagos the possibility, far from remote, of a new penalty on the grid for the reigning world champion is emerging. As reported by the Corriere dello Sport, the problem that seriously risks costing Mercedes the remaining chances of the world title would concern the crankshaft.
The rigidity of the regulation practically allows no room for intervention, not even for the so often exploited ‘reasons of reliability’. In fact, even those changes, justified for security reasons, require numerous bureaucratic steps, Federation authorizations and so on. Furthermore, trivially, it takes time to produce new pieces. But time is just what the Anglo-German team does not have. There is only one month left for the World Championship and four races are likely to be too few both to put a patch of any kind on this heavy reliability deficit, and to recover 19 points in the standings from Max Verstappen.
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