Secret Mechanic: Failures will gnaw at Mercedes

This year's Formula 1 cars are truly complex pieces of kit. The technology's impressive and, speaking as a mechanic, that's one of the things that makes working in this sport such a privilege.

To be at the cutting edge of technological advancement, to be there when some of the most inventive and ingenious ideas are brought to life, is the reason many of us got involved in the first place.

At the beginning of 2014, many people predicted a disaster, suggesting races might end with a mere handful of finishers and that the sport might be ridiculed as a result. In all honesty, many of us inside F1 wondered the same after pre-season testing.

In reality, every team on the grid did a spectacularly impressive job in integrating the new and highly complicated hybrid power units into their cars.

Rosberg's side of the garage has had a smoother ride for much of the year © LAT

Mechanics worked harder and longer than we have for many years, continuously stripping, inspecting, rebuilding and reworking the machinery in an attempt to get it right. And in the most part, the results have been testament to that huge team effort.

Perhaps surprisingly then, it's the big-budget team with the fastest, the most adaptable to any circuit type, most fuel efficient and the most dominant car we've seen for years, that's also proving the most unreliable.

The Mercedes team is made up of some of the very best in every field, yet the W05 just keeps on suffering 'avoidable' issues.

For the team members, that can have a number of effects.

Before Sunday's Singapore Grand Prix, one half of the Mercedes garage could've been forgiven for thinking that luck just wasn't on their side this year.

Knowing some of them as I do, there was a definite feeling that if Lewis Hamilton's side were going to win this year's title, they might have to work considerably harder for it than Nico Rosberg's crew were looking like doing.

Perhaps 'Team Rosberg' themselves might've started to believe, should they indeed win, that it might be somehow undervalued by others in and around the sport. Those undertones within a team can drive the 'unfortunate' side on through determination alone, but can also leave the apparently 'lucky' half of the team with a misguided sense of embarrassment or even guilt as the phenomenon grows.

Rosberg joined his team on the Singapore pitwall for the rest of the evening © XPB

Under the lights of Singapore's night race, Nico's half of the team finally came up against their worst nightmare: finding a serious problem on the way to the grid.

I've been there too, with a driver describing on the radio a fault that either wasn't there an hour earlier, or was somehow missed and that soon becomes clear there's no quick fix for.

There's nothing you can do except try to make the best of a terrible situation, knowing that the consequences are going to be substantial.

I have to say that on Sunday I was impressed with the calmness of the Mercedes engineers in the way they tried their best to talk Rosberg through the impending pitstop with very little of his driver controls functioning. I've worked with people on our own pitwall in the past whose radio transmissions in the same situation would've been an octave or two higher to say the very least.

The team personnel know it's their responsibility to provide their drivers with a car they can push to the limit. Designers need to come up with the concepts and spec the parts, production departments have to manufacture to within microns of accuracy and then at the end of the day, mechanics have to assemble the whole lot, over and over again, in faultless fashion.

These aren't just distant ideals to work towards, they're the basic job descriptions of those involved and an absolute necessity for any F1 team.

Hamilton's mechanical woes included Hungary qualifying fire © XPB

When any, or all, of these fall short repeatedly, it's easy for the individuals to begin questioning their own integrity, for one group within the team to start feeling let down by another. The inevitable media interest, as Mercedes attracted post-Singapore, can pile the pressure onto the mechanics.

As the intensity of the championship battle increases, the fear of more failures can really play on your mind and affect what you do.

Any resentment of a group of people deemed to be letting the side down can, in the worst case, grow like a cancer throughout the team, and attempts by management to dispel these ideas might only succeed in fuelling the fire.

The guys in that team know all too well that if any other car on the grid was as fast as theirs this year, they'd be in serious trouble through their unreliability problems.

That's not a good situation to be in, and one that definitely won't sit comfortably with the Mercedes board.

You can be fairly sure that the top of the hierarchy at Brackley will be under some serious pressure to ensure the season is remembered for the dominance of the W05, not its continual technical deficiencies.

It's all too easy - and I've been there myself - for a team to start doing things differently because the world is questioning them from the outside, when the right thing to do is to stick with your principles and just make sure everyone's doing their jobs properly. Knee-jerk reactions can often cause more trouble than they fix.

A well-known figure in the paddock once said to me: "If you spend all season wiping your arse with one hand, then suddenly at one race switch to wiping with the other... don't be surprised when you get shit on your thumb!"