Zandvoort was a tricky weekend for Mercedes
Mercedes Formula 1 boss Toto Wolff has described the W15 is a “surprise box” in the wake of a disappointing weekend for the team at Zandvoort.
After Lewis Hamilton and George Russell won three of the four races held before the summer break they tumbled to seventh and eighth places in the Dutch GP, with Russell ahead after dropping back from an early third place.
Tyre degradation meant that both drivers stopped twice – and they were the only frontrunners obliged to do so.
“I think these cars are sometimes a surprise box,” said Wolff. “We had six podiums in a row, and that doesn’t look like the car that three weeks ago was first and second, at least first on merit.
“And you can’t really end up with a result like this without any major factor playing, and that’s something we need to analyse in the next few days, until Monza.
“Was it because we put something on the car that didn’t that didn’t help? Did we engineer something into the car that that wasn’t good? And how do you justify the swings of performance that some sometimes looked really good this weekend?
“And then obviously today that was, in terms of degradation, not very impressive.”
Regarding the strategy he said: “I don’t think that we had lots of choices. Our degradation was really bad, and we could have hung out there with a tyre that was going down and ended up P7, P8, or just try the two-stop and maybe catch Perez or Sainz, which we didn’t at the end.
“So whatever we’ve done didn’t really work because of the car not being in a good place.”
Wolff noted that circumstances didn’t leave the team with much information during practice.
“I think it was two factors,” he said. “We back-to-backed the update kit on Friday, which at the end left us with not a lot of data – the update kit that we put onto the car in Spa on Friday, and then took off again.
“And then obviously with the lack of running like everybody else maybe we didn’t decide the right things for the car. And so there could be a few factors at play that contributed to this non-performance.”
Wolff was reluctant to blame the new floor, which was abandoned prior to qualifying in Spa, and revived for Zandvoort.
“I don’t want to jump to into conclusions too quickly, because we’re going to look at it in the coming days and hopefully trying to find clues in the data,” he noted.
“Like I said before, was it a setup? Was it the track? What is it that we got wrong? Was it the floor that we put on the car? Was it all of this together?
“So hopefully we can sort it out until Monza and be competitive again. But the swing in performance between P1, P2 and P7, P8 is there’s something, there’s a biggie in there, that’s not something that was a simple setup decision, in my opinion.”
Asked if Monza’s nature would help the car he said: “I would hope very much hope that we can come back to the performances that we’ve shown in Spa.
“But it’s not only that it’s a high-speed track versus what we had here, because our car was competitive for practically all of the last few races. It’s just here, it was completely offset. So we’ve just got to get it right, and then we can play with the music again.”
Adam Cooper F1 