Lewis Hamilton was lucky just to finish the Brazilian Grand Prix after a “failure imminent” warning came up during the race, Mercedes has revealed.
The Briton re-inherited the victory at Interlagos after initially losing the lead to Max Verstappen but would regain it after the Dutchman collided with Esteban Ocon a few laps later.
Throughout the race though, there was concern about his engine with the team having to turn it down and motorsport boss Toto Wolff explained just how critical the situation became.
“We had such a horrible race, we have the engine guys here and back at base, and what I could hear – because I have about 10 channels open! – on the meeting channel, was ‘Lewis Hamilton power unit failure imminent, it’s going to fail within the next lap’,” he said.
“I put the volume up and I was like ‘Excuse me, what?’ and they said ‘Yeah, we’ve got a massive problem on the power unit, it’s going to fail next lap’.
“It didn’t fail next lap and I said, ‘When you guys have a minute, tell me what’s happening’. So I let them work.
“They said, ‘Well our exhaust is just about to fail and we’re overshooting all the temperature limits’. So I said ‘What’s the fix?’ And they started to fix it by turning the whole thing down.
“The temperatures went down to below 1,000C, to 980C, but it’s still too high, and then he recovered another lap and that was truly horrible.”
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Perhaps unaware of just how he close he came to retiring, Hamilton admitted the battle he had to beat Verstappen was tough but exciting.
“We were struggling, we had problems with the engine but when Max had his crash, I came through and after that, I didn’t want to give it up again,” he said.
“I did everything I could to keep that gap to him. It was one of the toughest experiences I have had for some time but I enjoyed it, I love a challenge like that.”
The eventual gap over the finish line was just 1.4s as the Red Bull driver also fought against the loss of downforce he had from the damage caused in the Ocon clash.