Mercedes introduced an upgraded engine at the Italian Grand Prix which Lotus’ trackside operations director Alan Permane claims was worth around 0.3 seconds a lap.
The Brackley team only ran the new unit in race winner Lewis Hamilton’s car during the race after Nico Rosberg’s unit suffered an issue on Saturday.
Hamilton won the race by just over 25 seconds to Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel, leading Red Bull team principal Christian Horner to describe it as “frightening”.
Permane, whose Lotus team has yet to get hold of the upgraded engine, believes it’s worth a significant amount of lap time over the engine they’re currently running.
“I’m told it’s 0.3s [at Monza],” he told F1i. “I don’t know for sure, we haven’t spoken to our Mercedes people about it. Of course anything we can get is great, but we’re very happy with what we’ve got at the moment.
“Our third engines went in at Monza and performed faultlessly, but I don’t know what the plan is and whether our fourth engine will be the next generation or not.”
