Mercedes: No "performance freezes" with current power units

Mercedes engine boss Andy Cowell has said that there are no "performance freezes" with the current power units in Formula 1, with gains to be made everywhere no matter how small.

Mercedes wrapped up their sixth consecutive constructors title during 2019, having dominated the hybrid era since its introduction back in 2014 after designing the best engine for most of the years.

But Cowell says that despite with the amount of time they have to develop their engines, there aren’t any points in which the power unit isn’t developed further with small gains made everywhere and bigger gains in places that have been ignored or not looked at for a while.

"At the moment there are no performance freezes in the power unit world," he explained in a Motorsport magazine podcast.

"We've just completed our sixth championship, and with 18 months of development before we went racing and six years it's a long time for the engineers to optimize. So the gains end up smaller, but you end up looking in more areas.

"You start looking in areas where you assumed there wouldn't be a gain and often because you've not gone hunting there before, you do find reasonably-sized gains.

"With every update the power gets better in terms of power and reliability."