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Toto Wolff mentions the disappointing performance of Mercedes on Paul Ricard ‘a slap in the face.’ The team boss of the Zilverpijlen says he has no idea why the W13 suddenly seems to have taken a step back.
Lewis Hamilton took fourth place on the grid in qualifying on Saturday, but was almost a second short of the time for pole position. This while Mercedes is on the hunt after encouraging weekends at Silverstone and the Red Bull Ring Red Bull Racing in Ferrari wanted to open. A new update package was supposed to help with that, but for the time being the new parts don’t seem to work out well. If it is because of that, because the German superpower itself has no idea yet.
No performance
“We were slowly but surely closing the gap to the top teams,” Wolff said after qualifying. “At Silverstone we saw some promising things and then we went to Austria…A circuit where we are normally not competitive at all, but this time we were there,” he quotes. Pitpass. “Then we brought a good update package to Paul Ricard: a slick track we wanted to hunt for. And then… no performance. Absolutely no performance.”
Experiment
What it is, the Austrian does not know: “We have no idea. We have no idea where it went wrong. We experimented with the rear wings, of the largest we have, Lewis described it as dragging a parachute behind the car , to a smaller version which caused us to lose too much speed in the corners. Then we experimented with the tire temperature and now we are 0.7 seconds behind Verstappen.”
question marks
“The Ferrari lap is a bit of an outlier due to the tow of [Carlos] Sainz”, Wolff refers to the lap time of pole sitter Charles Leclerc. “But if you had told me before the weekend that we would be 0.7 to 0.9 seconds off pace, it would have been a slap in the face.” Whether the problem arises from the balance between aerodynamics and friction, he does not know. “But there’s clearly something going on.”
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