EXPLOITING THE LOOPHOLE

Hamilton may be blindingly clever in the car, but you have to admire his tactical brain out of it, too

HOUGHT Formula One was confusing? Try this. Lewis Hamilton, the leader of the world championship, took a massive penalty that moved him to the back of the grid for round 13 in Belgium and yet, because of it, he knew he would be better off than Nico Rosberg, his Mercedes team-mate and title rival, in the remaining eight races.

How does that work? It’s thanks to exploitation of a loophole which, when all is said and done, is the technical DNA of motorsport. In this case, the get-out clause has arisen because it is the leastworst option for an issue as complex as the power units involved.

The root of the problem lies with a necessary need to curb costs. Twenty- ve years ago, budgets would allow routine daily engine changes. It was not uncommon to nd teams with two drivers and a spare car running as many as 50 engines in a continual cycle of manufacture, use and rebuild.

When the costs skyrocketed, a brake on expenditure was applied in 2005 when each car was limited to one engine per two Grands Prix weekends. This was tightened to a maximum of eight engines per season and has been squeezed further to the current limit of ve during 2016, a year when the challenge has been exacerbated further by more races (21) than ever before.

All of this might have been workable had the engines – or power units, as they are now known – not become incredibly complicated with the introduction of a completely new formula in

T2014. The units comprise an internal-combustion engine (ICE), a turbo, an MGU-H (recovering energy from the turbo), an MGU-K (recovering energy from the rear axle), an energy store and control electronics. The rst time a driver uses a sixth unit of any of these elements, he receives a 10-place grid penalty. A further ve places are added each subsequent time a sixth element is used. And so it goes on for a seventh and an eighth.

Hamilton knew he would eventually be in trouble when he suffered MGU-H failures in China and Russia earlier in the year. It was inevitable that he would have used his allocated number of parts before the 21 races were done. The penalty was taken in Belgium because Spa presents more opportunities for overtaking than, say, upcoming races in Singapore or Suzuka.

Indeed, the fast and wide nature of the quick bits at Spa were so favourable that Mercedes decided to take a major hit by effectively tting a number of new units during the weekend knowing that, even though the total would come to 55 grid places, the penalty would not be carried over to the next race. In other words, the maximum would be 22 places and the back of the grid start in Belgium. There was no extra penalty for adding a sixth ICE, MGU-K and MGU-H. He could go no further back.

The net effect was to provide Hamilton with a pool of new parts that, reliability permitting, will see him to the end of the season without further replacements and attendant penalties.