Lewis Hamilton's car, Mercedes, Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, 2019

Mercedes racing to fix hydraulic leak on Hamilton’s car before Canadian GP

2019 Canadian Grand Prix

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Mercedes face a race against time to conclude repairs on Lewis Hamilton’s car before the start of the Canadian Grand Prix.

A hydraulic leak was discovered on the team’s number 44 car overnight. Hamilton is due to start today’s race from second on the grid in just over two hours’ time.

A Mercedes spokesperson said the leak was discovered late yesterday afternoon. “We have diagnosed the source after the car came out of parc ferme and are now putting the car back together.”

The spokesperson added the team “plan to be ready” in time for the race and do not expect Hamilton will receive any grid penalties as a result of the repairs.

The team has introduced new ‘phase two’ power units on all of its cars including both its customer teams, Racing Point and Williams, this weekend. Valtteri Bottas suffered a hydraulic leak at the end of first practice and racing Point’s Lance Stroll had to revert to his old specification power unit following a failure in Saturday morning’s final hour of running.

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said the team was not considering turning down its engine for reliability in the wake of Stroll’s power unit failure. Racing Point initially described the problem as a hydraulic leak.

Lewis Hamilton's car, Mercedes, Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, 2019
Lewis Hamilton’s car, Mercedes, Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, 2019
Lewis Hamilton's car, Mercedes, Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, 2019
Lewis Hamilton’s car, Mercedes, Circuit Gilles Villeneuve, 2019

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Keith Collantine
Lifelong motor sport fan Keith set up RaceFans in 2005 - when it was originally called F1 Fanatic. Having previously worked as a motoring...

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10 comments on “Mercedes racing to fix hydraulic leak on Hamilton’s car before Canadian GP”

  1. I’m a Ferrari fan, but I hope they fix his engine. I want us to win on merit and not at Mercedes’ expense.

    All the best to them.

    1. Agreed

    2. Nah, let’s not pretend, we would be happy if they had a problem or two and the season would be suddenly lively.

  2. Last year as well they had issues with 2nd PU.

  3. What I don’t understand is how these engines have this kind of issue so soon when they are supposed tested for hours/days in the factory…Is there some failure in the process that they need to address? Don’t they test in a real car and do simulations in the factory as well? Fingers crossed they sort in time and it doesn’t pose an issue in the race.

  4. Things break, seems like more Merc efficiency for discovering it before the race..unless there was a big puddle under the car.. :)

  5. I want the season to get shaken up but not like this. Let’s have the action on track please not in the garage.
    Merc are very very good. They’l sort it.

    1. Why not? There always used to be those guys who got to be unluckier than the others and lost much with their reliability. I think it would be an interesting impulse to the season, though I’m not praying for it.

  6. A first corner pile up at the front would make it real interesting….Maxwise? .

  7. Ferrari keep abusing parc ferme no wonder we really see vets ar and his only fail.

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