Toto Wolff believes the Japanese Grand Prix has yielded some important answers to perplexing questions for Mercedes as it gains an understanding of how to extract performance from its car.
George Russell finished seventh and Lewis Hamilton ninth at Suzuka, a reversal of their qualifying positions after a frustrating weekend in terms of final results. However, Wolff says the previous race in Australia allowed Mercedes to prove it has raw aerodynamic potential in the car that is just simply not yet translating into the expected performance.
[lawrence-auto-related count=3 category=1388]
“I think the car is so complex where we put it in terms of the aero balance and the mechanical balance, and these two need to correlate,” he said.
“We’ve followed a certain trajectory over the last years, and keep going in circles and we came to a point saying ‘okay we’re going to do something different here,’ because we are measuring downforce with our sensors and our pressure tabs and it’s telling us we have 70 points more downforce in a particular corner in Melbourne than we had last year, but in lap time it’s not a kilometer per hour faster, so it doesn’t make any sense.
“So where is the limitation? I think we wanted to tick a few boxes to understand is there any limitation that we haven’t spotted, and I think there is.
“There should be more downforce than we believe it is, and now we’ve measured the downforce and it’s there, we’re just not able to extract the lap time out of it that we should and that simulations show us. It’s not trivial.”
Given the experiments Mercedes has carried out over the last few races, and with Hamilton actually stating how much happier with the car’s handling he was prior to Sunday, Wolff says the finishing positions should not distract the team from the signs of progress.
“When you look at the results – 7th and 9th in qualifying and 7th and 9th in the race – that’s clearly not good. And everybody knows that. But we’ve definitely made a big step forward in how we want to run the car and in our understanding.
“This was one of the worst tracks for us last year, we were pretty close to the frontrunners – not Max [Verstappen] but the guys behind – in qualifying, that came as a surprise. We were very quick through the Esses, where last year we were nowhere.
“And in the race when you look at how it unfolded we were trying to make a one-stop stick, probably over-managed the tires and had an atrocious first stint but a very competitive second and third stint once we basically did what the others did. That would have looked completely different.
“So seventh and ninth, just not good. There’s nothing to add, nothing to make rosey, I think we’re going away from Suzuka not happy with the result but definitely there is more to come.”