Formula 1 championship leader Lewis Hamilton admits that he “needs more power” from his Mercedes engine if he is to fend off the growing threat posed by Ferrari in 2018.
After passing the polesitter Hamilton on the long Kemmel Straight during the opening lap of last weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix, Vettel proceeded to claim a dominant race victory.
The Ferrari driver slashed Hamilton’s lead in the drivers’ championship from 24 points to 17.
“When you start first and you finish second, it always hurts,” said Hamilton when speaking to the official F1 site. “It’s never not the case.
“But I gave it everything that I could today, I pushed as hard as I could. I got as much as I could out of the car and it just didn’t work, unfortunately.
“When he [Vettel] came out of Turn 1, he had just the perfect gap between me and there was nothing I could really do about it. When he came passed he came sailing passed and I had no answer to it.
“They’ve been quickest since Austria, and we don’t really have an answer for them at the moment.
“We’ve come [to Belgium] with a very, very good upgrade and theirs is even better. How, I don’t know. So, I need more power.”
Since the dawn of the V6 hybrid era in 2014, Mercedes has near undisputably fielded the most powerful engine. The team has won the last four drivers’ and constructors’ championships.
However, its rivals have since closed the gap significantly and so far in 2018, Ferrari-powered cars have topped speed trap statistics more often than Mercedes runners.
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff identified a number of areas in addition to the power unit that, judging from the Belgian Grand Prix performance, Mercedes has slipped behind Ferrari.
“When I look at the race I see many deficits,” said Wolff. “It is the slow speed, and it is the traction.
“This is what I would summarise as the main weaknesses at the moment.
“Plus clearly, compared to the Ferraris and the Red Bulls and the Force Indias, [we were] the car that was cooking the tyres the most.
“They [Ferrari] have a power advantage. We saw that in qualifying that their power advantage is on various parts of the straight, and you can see that even if the [corner] exits are worse than ours, their engine keeps pulling.
“If you aren’t very good on traction and you are being outperformed slightly on power then lap one happens.”
With Valtteri Bottas already on his fourth set of power unit elements for the season, after being penalised for taking the Mercedes update in Belgium, and Hamilton on his third batch of elements, the team is unable to introduce any penalty-free hardware improvements in 2018.
The only way Mercedes can improve the power unit without facing penalties would be through software changes.
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