Formula 1 World Drivers' Championship contender George Russell has received a penalty ahead of the weekend's Singapore Grand Prix.
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The Mercedes driver, who sits second in the standings behind teammate Kimi Antonelli, will have to drop to the rear of the grid for the start of the Grand Prix. The reason is that the team exceeded the number of allowed engines being used in a season.
Each driver is allowed to use four engines over the course of a season. Using a fifth brings about a penalty. Russell will have to do so this week after an engine failure with five laps remaining in last week's race in Malaysia. He also had an engine failure in Canada earlier in the season.
According to The Athletic, Mercedes had aimed to time a change with giving Russell an upgraded engine specification under F1's Additional Development and Upgrade Opportunities (ADUO) rules.
If this works as planned, he will only have to serve the one penalty. If not, making the switch to the upgraded ADUO engine would trigger another penalty.
"It's a (power unit) failure," team boss Toto Wolff said about Russell's DNF. "It wasn't caused by the Safety Car, so we haven't assessed it yet.
"I'm so massively annoyed and not in a happy place. First of all, we didn't have the speed that we were hoping to have before the weekend, so there's a lot of homework to be done in order to recover, which I'm sure we will.
"Then the race literally, if you consider the fight with Lewis (Hamilton) behind, went against us. We had such an advantage, (but then) two VSCs or one VSC, two Safety Cars... you couldn't be more unlucky.
"To make things worse, a PU failure with a few laps to go to the end with George, which is terrible for his championship and not good at all for our constructor points. So as much as I love to be here, when I look at the pure race, it's one of my worst experiences, to be honest."
Russell had gained ground in the championship battle by scoring a dominant win in the Azerbaijan Grand Prix. He had cut Antonelli's lead to a mere 59 points. The DNF in Malaysia dropped him to 84 points back, and he is unlikely to recover these lost points after taking the penalty and starting from the rear of the grid in Singapore.
