Lewis Hamilton doesn't believe in the conspiracy theories shared by some of his fans, who believe Mercedes are intentionally making the Briton's life hard in order to ensure Nico Rosberg wins the title in 2016.
Hamilton suffered engine problems in both qualifying sessions for the Chinese and Russian races and then during the race, as he was beginning to close on Rosberg – having cut the gap from 14 seconds to just seven – the team told him to back off because of a water pressure problem.
Hamilton doesn't believe his problems are intentional or down to a recent team reshuffle which saw his mechanics move to Rosberg's car, whilst the German's switched to Hamilton's side at the beginning of the year.
"I don’t believe that that’s happened," Hamilton told Sky Sports of the conspiracy theories, "it’s not happened in the last three years and I don’t have any reason to believe that would happen now."
Speaking of the engineer switch, he added: "My side of the garage, the mechanics are definitely having a hard time, but I have absolutely every bit of confidence and faith in them.
"It’s an unusual situation for them, the majority of them were on Nico’s car last year. Nico’s guys were with me for the last three years since I joined the team and all of a sudden they’re swapped for no apparent reason.
"That is not the reason that we’re having these issues, it’s somewhere else. I don’t know where all these little issues are coming from but for sure the team, the guys in the background, they need to work hard to try and rectify these."
Hamilton ended by thanking his team for their efforts in ensuring he started tenth on the grid, which included flying parts in by private jet overnight and long hours to prepare his car.
"I’d like to thanks the guys who flew over last night from the factory," he said. "My mechanics worked so hard from like 2am in the morning to get my car ready. Without them I obviously wouldn’t even have got to this point so I was grateful for that."
