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Lewis Hamilton faced 'imminent' engine failure in final laps of Brazilian Grand Prix

Formula 1

The 2018 Brazilian Grand Prix nearly had one last twist in the tale after it emerged on Sunday night that eventual race winner Lewis Hamilton came close to a complete engine failure in the final few laps.

Hamilton started from pole position but lost the lead of the race on lap 40 when Max Verstappen breezed past him on a superior strategy. He gained it back four laps later when the Red Bull tangled with backmarker Esteban Ocon, but what wasn't obvious at the time was that Hamilton's engine temperatures were sky-rocketing and the whole power unit was close to a complete failure.

"I could feel it," Hamilton said. "I have been driving this engine since the beginning of the year and I know all about it and how it feels and pretty much every note I know like the back of my hand.

"So when I started to feel it was not operating at its normal harmony -- for me I cannot allow any negative thought getting into my mind, so I just stay focused on trying to do less full throttle lifting and going as easy as I can on the engine."

It was more than just a feeling. Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff said the team's engineers were working overtime to keep the engine from destroying itself.

"We have the engine guys here at the track and then we have them back at base, and what I could hear -- because I have about ten radio channels open -- on one of the ten channels, the meeting channel, was 'Lewis Hamilton power unit failure imminent, it's going to fail within the next lap'.

"I put the volume up and I was like 'Excuse me, what?' And they said 'Yeah we've got a massive problem on the power unit, it's going to fail next lap'. It didn't fail next lap and I said 'When you guys have a minute, tell me what's happening". So I let them work.

"And they said 'Well our exhaust is just about to fail and we're overshooting all the temperature limits'.

"So I said 'What's the fix?' And they started to fix it by turning the whole thing down. The temperatures went down to below 1000C, to 980C, but it's still too high, and then he recovered another lap and that was truly horrible."

Inside the cockpit, Hamilton was balancing all the setting changes he needed to make with keeping Verstappen, who had rejoined the race and was chasing him down, at a safe distance.

"There was a lot of great work done by the engineers here and back in the UK who were working on what they could turn down and tweak," he said. "So I was getting a lot of balls thrown at me while I was driving and trying to do all the other stuff, like switch changes, 'can you do a default setting?' and juggling that and they kept on throwing it at me.

"I was really grateful that the engine finished and for the last 10 laps I was really just shouting in the car 'come on baby, you can do it. Let's keep it together...' and willing on the car. You could never imagine how crazy that feeling is in the car when your heart rate is at, mine must have been above 190, those last 10 laps I was at flat-chat trying to hold on to a car, which was already struggling. I just felt so elated and so grateful."

Had Hamilton's engine failed, Ferrari would have outscored Mercedes by enough points to keep the constructors' championship open for another round.

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