SUZUKA, Japan -- After Lewis Hamilton suffered another slow start at the Japanese Grand Prix, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff has admitted the car's clutch has its flaws.
The British driver took the blame for his poor getaway at Suzuka, but after three other similarly poor starts this year, Wolff was willing to admit the problem was not entirely Hamilton's.
"The clutch, obviously, is not perfect. We are giving it to them and it is difficult to handle," he said. "We have tried to optimise that but our first assessment was that it didn't function well on the clutch release -- dumping the clutch -- but that is obviously an oversimplification. It is a complex system to deploy and that didn't function today."
New clutch regulations were introduced at the start of the year to make starts more unpredictable, but teams have all worked on ways to improve consistency. Mercedes' poor starts have often been more obvious than others because at least one of its cars has started from the front row at every round this season.
Wolff confirmed the clutch is bespoke to the Mercedes -- even Force India which uses the same gearbox has a different one -- and admits that the system, although good when it works, has its pitfalls.
"I have never driven the clutch, so I can only tell you what we analyse. It is difficult to handle the clutch in the right way and both drivers have worked on that, going as far as changing the way the glove has been done to release it.
"This is just one aspect on how it goes, how you release it and how you build the revs, and that is very complicated, then there is the random factor of getting all of that right and that is not always very easy with the clutch."
The poor start could not have come at a worse time for Hamilton after he retired from the lead of last weekend's Malaysian Grand Prix and missed out on pole position by 0.013s to teammate and title rival Nico Rosberg in Japan. By starting second, Hamilton was on the damp side of the track and Wolff said that may have also played some part in the poor start.
"The damp line was of course a problem for anyone who was on the right side [of the grid], you can see that also Daniel Ricciardo also didn't get the start right, he lost a position. Position one, three and five went ahead to the first couple of corners, so that was a problem and it was a shame that the circuit doesn't dry out after it has rained overnight, it's bizarre."