It was one of Formula One’s great cries. “Oh no, no!” exclaimed race leader Lewis Hamilton, as he pulled his car to the side of the Sepang circuit after a Mercedes engine failure in 2016. It was a costly 25-point loss, handing the initiative to teammate Nico Rosberg, who would go on to win that year’s hotly contested world championship.
And astonishingly, a decade on, as F1 returned for a one-off ‘Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia’ on Sunday, it was an eerie sense of deja vu for the title protagonists, Mercedes and their incandescent team boss Toto Wolff.
