Hamilton: Engine mode confusion "dangerous"

Both Hamilton and Rosberg were hit with the same engine mapping issue – which meant their power unit was derating to store energy at certain sections of the track, rather than delivering to its maximum throughout the lap.

But while Rosberg was able to cure the issue within a lap, Hamilton took 12 laps for the situation to rectify itself as he played around with various engine mode settings.

Having expressed his frustration at the way F1’s team radio clampdown meant his engineers could not tell him what needed to be done, Hamilton said after the race that he was far from happy about how it left him out on track.

Asked how it felt in the car, he said: “Dangerous. I am just looking at my steering wheel for a large portion of the lap - all the way down the straight just looking at my wheel.

“All they can tell me is there is a switch error, wrong switch position, so I am looking at every single switch thinking, am I being an idiot here? Have I done something wrong? I hadn't.

"I looked time and time again, going through all the different switch positions and there was nothing that looked irregular.”

No change

Hamilton claimed that in the end it was not a switch change that got him in the right mode, but more that the engine sorted itself out.

“They said it will work itself out… and it did with eight laps to go,” he said. “I didn't know what the problem was.

“I didn't know if I had done anything to make the engine not work. The team started with something switched on, so I had it from the beginning.

“I disabled something and it didn't change anything, I put it back on, it didn't change anything. In the end I switched it off again, and the engine power came back 10 laps after that, my nine laps to go, so I turned the engine down after that.”

Rosberg difficulties

Rosberg said that the situation for himself had not been that easy either – but the team suggested he had been helped by a change of setting he had made shortly before the problem struck.

“It wasn’t easy because of the clampdown on radio communication, so they couldn’t tell us specifically what it was,” explained Rosberg.

“But I felt the issue out on track with the engine being down on power, so I looked at my steering wheel and figured that 'it must be that one, so take it off' and it was working fine afterwards."

When asked if it was obvious what he had to do, he said: “Not obvious at all. It was just, I had to think about it because I feel it.

“They said it was a problem with the mode you are in, but which mode? There are so many modes. So I thought about it and figured that that was the one. [It was] just putting together the feeling and what they [the switches] do.”