Suffering one reliability problem in Formula 1 can sometimes be down to bad luck, but when a team suffers two on the same component almost simultaneously, that is often a sign that something major has gone wrong. So when Mercedes announced ahead of qualifying for the British Grand Prix that Valtteri Bottas needed a gearbox change – just one week after Lewis Hamilton had to do the same in Austria – alarm bells began to ring. For while there had been suspicions after Baku (denied by Mercedes) that Hamilton’s failure could have been caused by the bash he got from Sebastian Vettel, it was clear when Bottas’ system needed changing too that this was something far more critical. And...
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