Mercedes recognizes that the advances made with the 2024 car ended up becoming insufficient due to problems in other areas. Despite a promising start to the Formula 1 Chinese GP weekend, with Lewis Hamilton taking second place in the Sprint race on Saturday, the German team had a disappointing performance in Sunday’s GP, with Hamilton finishing only in ninth place, whilst George Russell finished seventh.
Toto Wolff, Mercedes boss, admitted his dissatisfaction with the result: “We are not satisfied at all. Maybe second place in the Sprint was a small highlight, but the overall performance is not where it needs to be.”
“We can continue to remember the positives from the weekend, but we need to take it one step further. We will bring news to Miami, where we expect an evolution, but at the moment, we are behind Ferrari and Lando (Norris from McLaren). It’s just not good enough,” he added.
Mercedes chose to redesign the car’s concept to eliminate the unwanted characteristics of the previous model, but encountered a ‘fundamental’ problem at high speeds. However, Wolff highlighted the car’s strength in corners like Suzuka’s ‘Esses’ as proof that initial concerns had been alleviated.
However, the Austrian leader acknowledged that the improvements were neutralized by other deficiencies. “I think we definitely achieved our goal at high speed. At Suzuka in the ‘Esses’ we were super competitive, it was night and day compared to what we had before,” he said.
“The drivers said it was the best car they had in the last two and a half years. But then we didn’t have good performance at low speed. So you gain half a second on the way up, but lose half a second on the way down. The equation goes back to zero, and that’s something we need to improve.”
“We are beyond the point of trying to understand the problem and we just need to evolve now. That’s what we need to focus on, and we have all the data on the table. We know what we adjusted to solve the problem at high speed, and we know how fast the car was before at low speed. Now we just need to put the pieces together so that the car can perform well in both scenarios”, concluded Wolff.
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