Concerns over Mercedes reliability could be creeping in after Williams installed their third engine of pre-season testing on Wednesday.
Nicholas Latifi’s car came to a stop during the morning session, requiring the power unit change over lunch to allow George Russell out onto the track in the afternoon.
And though Williams is certainly enjoying a better pre-season than 12 months ago, the stoppages are still setbacks in their bid to make progress.
“A few engine problems, which is a little frustrating,” deputy team boss Claire Williams said.
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“We’re on our third engine issue now, which has obviously cost us quite a lot of track time, which is unfortunate.
“I suppose at least it’s not our issue, [it’s not] that something’s gone wrong with the car,” she conceded.
“Apart from that, it’s gone well, we’re covering different programmes as we can with the limited mileage that we’ve got. But I would be happier if we have some more miles under our belt.”
Usually in testing, engine changes are done more frequently when issues occur to help find solutions and Mercedes themselves had to change the engine in the W11 costing Valtteri Bottas come track time during the first test.
Meanwhile, despite the delays, Williams are remaining positive even as their running is compromised.
“It’s still good. I think everyone’s probably a little frustrated because we’ve probably got, as every team will be when you really got six days running, you’ve got a very full programme to get through,” Claire admitted.
“When you lose, you know the number of kilometres that we’ve lost, it is frustrating because it just means you can’t prepare as best as you would like to do ahead of going to Melbourne.
“You have to sacrifice certain parts of your programme in favour of others and obviously we wanted to do the full programme.
“So it is what it is, and we’ve just got to get on with it and hope that we don’t have any further issues in the next two days and we can get as many laps in with George and Nicholas on Thursday and Friday as possible set us up in the best possible way for Melbourne.”
