After looking so strong at Silverstone just a week earlier Mercedes once again struggled with tyre management in Germany, as both Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg lacked grip.
Ross Brawn admitted that the ban on attending the Silverstone test – where the ‘Hungary’ tyres will be run by rival teams – is even more costly now.
“It doesn’t help, because obviously we won’t be trying the ’12 tyre on this car until we get to Hungary,” he said when asked by this writer. “It would have been nice to at least have had an insight. But it’s what we have to live with.”
Brawn said that with the one-off tyres used in Germany the high temperatures on race day appeared didn’t do Mercedes any favours.
“There were some things like swapping the rears, which was helpful, and that’s disappeared now. Silverstone wasn’t that warm, Montreal wasn’t warm, and we always said we need a hot race. This felt a little bit like some of the races earlier in the year where we struggled until things cooled down a little bit.
“I think the ability to swap tyres before was a good way of offsetting the stress in a tyre, so you could use it in qualifying and then swap it and have it in a different condition for the race. You can’t do that with these tyres, there’s no advantage to doing it with these tyres. And I think we were back into going over the limit of the temperatures of the tyres, and suffering because of it.
“The first half of the race was pretty horrible, and then the second half of the race, the fuel weight went down, it got a touch cooler, and we got back in the window again. And it was respectable. Times weren’t so bad. It just shows how critical we are. But on high fuel at the beginning of the race, trying to push, we just overstressed the tyres. We have to try and find more solutions to resolve that.
“I think it is something you fall over the edge of. The track temperature did take it over that threshold, and the fact that it came back a bit towards us for the second half of the race I think demonstrated that. The fuel weight went down. I don’t think it necessarily did get any cooler in the second half, but certainly when the fuel weight went down, we were in a better position.”
Brawn conceded that it was difficult to get a handle on the change of spec, which will change once again by the next race.
“When we ran the [2013 prototype] tyres in Brazil the newer tyres did seem to run a little bit hotter, but we’re not sure where this tyre that we had today sits in that whole thing, so it’s a little bit difficult to judge. I think the solutions or things that we have to do will be relevant, whether we stayed with this tyre or whether we get the 2012 cars that we’re going to have in Hungary.”
He admitted that the drivers were frustrated, but said everyone was working to improve the situation.
“Lewis wears his heart on his sleeve, but he’s very constructive after the race. We had a very constructive debrief, because we’ve got to look at where we came from. We’re disappointed today because we scored 12 points. Second half of last year we would have given our right arm for 12 points.
“We’re still second in the championship, and we’ve still got a lot of things we can do. They’re healthy frustrations, they’re not negative. Both drivers have given us a lot of good insight in the debrief we’ve just had.”
Adam Cooper F1 