Was Mercedes’ new underbody to blame for the problems at the F1 GP in the Netherlands?
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has admitted that the team’s poor performance at the Dutch F1 Grand Prix may have been due to the new chassis.
After Mercedes decided not to use a new floor after Friday practice at the last race in Belgium, they decided to use the new specification in Zandvoort, where the team had a tough weekend.
George Russell was left perplexed after slipping from fourth to seventh in Sunday’s Grand Prix, one place ahead of Lewis Hamilton, who recovered from a disastrous qualifying that led to his Q2 exit.
This was a stark contrast to the recent competitive situation for Mercedes, which had entered the second half of the season as an in-form F1 team, winning three of the previous four rounds.
“I think these cars are sometimes a surprise box. We’ve had six podiums in a row and this doesn’t look like the car three weeks ago that was first and second, at least not first on merit,” Wolff told the media, including Crash.net, in Zandvoort.
“You can’t really end up with a result like that without an important factor coming into play. That’s something we have to analyse in the next few days until Monza. Was it because we did something to the car that didn’t help? Did we put something in the car that wasn’t good?”
“So how do you justify these fluctuations in performance? Some weekends we looked really good, but today the deterioration was obviously not very impressive.”
Wolff believes that the limited driving performance during practice was a factor in Mercedes’ difficulties.
“We installed the update kit one after the other on Friday, so we didn’t have a lot of data at the end – the update kit we installed on the car on Friday in Spa and then started again,” he said.
“And then, like everyone else, he 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 poor performance.”
When asked if he thought the soil might not be working as hoped, Wolff replied: “I don’t want to jump to conclusions too quickly because we will be looking at it over the next few days and hopefully try to find clues in the data.”
“Was it a setup? Was it the track? What did we do wrong? Was it the ground we put on the car? Was it all of the things together?
“Hopefully we can get this under control by Monza and become competitive again. But the power fluctuations between P1-P2 and P7-P8 are a big problem. In my opinion, this was not simply a setup decision.”
Seven-time world champion Hamilton expressed concerns about Mercedes’ recent upgrade after the race.
“I think the car definitely didn’t feel as strong as it did at the last race for some reason,” he said.
“We have to check this and wait and see whether our upgrade actually brings results or not.”
