Mercedes tweaks fuel pump design for Silverstone after Lewis Hamilton’s Austrian GP failure

Mercedes has tweaked the design of its fuel pump ahead of the British Grand Prix after Lewis Hamilton suffered a failure of a fastener during last weekend's Austrian GP, forcing his retirement from the race.

Hamilton relinquished the lead of the championship standings as a result of his retirement – his first in 33 races – with main title rival Sebastian Vettel opening up a one-point advantage.

Mercedes, ahead of Hamilton's home race, have installed a revised fuel pump fastener on its two cars, plus its four customer cars belonging to Force India and Williams.

As the change has been done for reliability purposes and not performance, it isn't subject to any penalty.

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Hamilton is confident thhe problem won't arise again and says he won't allow it to play on his mind this weekend.

"I think coming here there’s been some fixes already, immediately after the race, as soon as they got the car back, I think that evening there was a fix that was designed and put into test mode.

"So, the team was super on it and I’m confident we’ve done everything we can to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

"We’re human, so naturally every single individual in the team will have that [doubt] a little bit at the back of their mind, that nervousness. But as a driver, as an athlete and as a competitor I personally cannot allow that to interfere with my weekend.

"You go in with the same mentality as the last weekend – hoping for the car to be reliable. You can never predict what’s going to happen but that’s not getting in my way and I’m pretty certain that for the majority of people in the team they’re not letting that get in their way either."