Toto Wolff, the team principal for Mercedes, has suggested that the W15 might have an inherent drawback, a sentiment that came to light after a challenging weekend in Japan.
The event underscored the team’s inability to capitalize on an unconventional race strategy, a situation Wolff described as “awful.”
Wolff acknowledged a connection between the performance of the W15 and the track temperature during the races. However, he dismissed the idea that this was the primary reason for the team’s poor performance in the early stages of the Japanese Grand Prix.
As the team introduced a new design philosophy with their latest car, Mercedes had anticipated improvements in their performance for this season.
However, after four races, it seems the team, which has won the Constructors’ Championship eight times, has not made the progress expected and, in some respects, has fallen behind its competitors.
In the recent race at Suzuka, Mercedes drivers Lewis Hamilton and George Russell struggled to effectively implement a daring one-stop strategy. They finished the race in seventh and ninth place, respectively.
Wolff pinpointed the major challenge they encountered during the race. He noted a slight difference in track temperature between the first and second stints of the race, which significantly impacted the car’s performance.
“It was three degrees different in track temperature between stint one and stint two,” Wolff stated, clarifying whether the change in performance was due to a direct cause or merely a correlation, especially under cooler conditions.
“As much as I believe there is a relationship between our performance with the track temperature, I don’t think it was the reason for our awful performance in the first stint. It was trying to extend it to one stop, losing lots of time with the overtakes – more so than the track temperature.”
Currently, the Brackley-based Mercedes team has managed to accumulate only 34 points this season, placing them more than 100 points behind the leading team, Red Bull. George Russell’s fifth-place finish in Bahrain stands as the team’s highest achievement so far, while Red Bull has accomplished three one-two finishes.
Now in the third year of the current regulatory framework, Mercedes still seems to be grappling with the challenges presented by the latest generation of ground-effects Formula 1 cars and optimizing their car’s performance.
Despite securing third and second places in the Constructors’ Championships in the last two seasons, Mercedes has dropped to fourth place this year. They are also facing a challenge from Aston Martin, which is trailing closely behind with 33 points.
Toto Wolff, when questioned about any potential breakthroughs Mercedes might have discovered in Japan that could be beneficial moving forward, stated, “I think that the car is so complex for us, in terms of the aero balance and the mechanical balance – these two need to correlate.
“We’ve followed a certain trajectory over the last years and keep turning in circles, and we came to a point to say ‘okay, we’ve got to do something different here’, because we are measuring down-force with our sensors and pressure tabs and it’s telling us we have 70 points more down force in a particular corner in Melbourne than we had last year, but on the lap time, it’s not a kilometer per hour faster, so it doesn’t make any sense.
“So, where’s the limitation? I think we wanted to tick some boxes to understand: is there any limitation we have spotted, and I think there is.”
