Mercedes endured a disappointing weekend at the Dutch Grand Prix and team boss Toto Wolff wondered whether the car’s new underbody element could be to blame for the Brackely-led team’s lackluster performance.

Mercedes went into the weekend in Zandvoort with great expectations after the team had taken three wins in the last four races before the Formula 1 summer break.

However, George Russell and Lewis Hamilton’s subdued performance in qualifying was followed by further difficulties on race day. The former in particular started the race from fourth place on the grid and only finished seventh, one place ahead of Hamilton.

Wolff admitted that the team’s performance was cause for concern.

“I think the car, these cars are sometimes a box of surprises,” said Wolff after the race on Sunday.

“We’ve taken six podiums in a row and that doesn’t look like the car that was first and second three weeks ago. At least first under its own power.”

Wolff emphasized that such an unexpectedly poor result cannot be explained without taking into account important influencing factors.

“You can’t really achieve such a result without an important factor playing a role. We have to analyse that in the next few days before Monza,” he said.

“Was it because we did something to the car that didn’t help? Did we put something in the car that wasn’t good?

“How do you justify these fluctuations in performance? This weekend it looked really good at times, but today there was a huge deterioration. Not very impressive.”

In Spa, Mercedes introduced an updated underbody on its Silver Arrow W15, but the team ultimately decided to abandon it after the first day of racing in Belgium.

At Zandvoort, the new element was installed in Russell’s car for the first free practice session on Friday and by the second practice session – which was led by Russell – the team was so convinced of the benefits of the surface that they committed to running both cars with the update for the rest of the weekend.

Wolff wondered whether Mercedes had minimal data to assess the impact of the ground due to the rain-limited running time in FP1.

“I think it was two factors,” he explained. “We released the update kit back to back on Friday, which ended up giving us very little data.”

“And then, like everyone else, we may not have made the right decisions for the car due to a lack of driving experience.

“So there could have been several factors at play that contributed to this performance.”

©Mercedes

While it is still unclear whether the underbody was the sole cause of Mercedes’ poor performance, Wolff does not rule out the possibility. The Austrian stressed that the team must dig deeper to find answers.

“I don’t want to jump to conclusions too quickly because we will be looking at this over the next few days and hopefully trying to find clues in the data,” he explained.

“As I said, was it the setup, was it the track, what did we do wrong? Was it the ground we put on the car? Was it all of it?

“Hopefully we can get this under control by Monza and become competitive.

“But the power fluctuations between P1, P2 and P7, P8 are a big problem. In my opinion, this was not an easy setup decision.”

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