Rosberg’s engine under investigation

Nico Rosberg did not have the best of the races at Monza. What’s worse, he still doesn’t know if he can use the same power unit at Monza or would he switch to a new one at Singapore. Heading into the Italian Grand Prix, Mercedes used all of its development tokens for a new spec engine at Monza.

Both drivers drove that during Free Practice but a problem with the cooling system meant Rosberg could not use the new power unit. He reverted back to his old unit which he had used before for the previous five races.

After initially losing ground at the start, a successful undercut pit maneuver allowed Rosberg to move ahead of both Williams during the race and catch Sebastian Vettel, who was running in second. The Mercedes pit wall wanting maximum points in the constructors had allowed Rosberg to push the engine to catch the Ferrari. It was working and he had narrowed the gap down to a couple of seconds. But three laps from the end, and his engine had reached the limits.

His unit failed and caught fire, forcing his retirement from the race. Commenting after the race, Toto Wolff said the team will know if Rosberg can use the engine at Singapore or will he use his 4 unit of the season. He also said, there was no early warning to the system.

“We don’t know yet whether it is terminally damaged, and to make the point – it wasn’t an engine specific failure we had. It was a leak in the cooling system which led  the engine to fail.”

“The engine was on its sixth race, so it was very high on miles. We didn’t get any warnings, no.”

“We gave it a little push to try to catch up Sebastian and this is when it decided to call it a day.”

Given that Lewis Hamilton finished first, Rosberg could see the title slipping away from him, being 53 points behind his teammate and he might have to worry for a charging Sebastian Vettel who is now 21 points behind.