With the technical directive of the FIA, a new update and the grid penalties of the world championship leaders Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc, the Mercedes team would certainly have expected more at the Formula 1 race in Spa.
While Lewis Hamilton retired early on lap one, his team-mate George Russell couldn’t get past fourth place.
Team boss Toto Wolff described qualifying on Saturday as “the worst in 10 years”, but at least Russell’s racing pace seems to give the Silver Arrows some hope. The Briton narrowly missed out on the podium, just over two seconds down on Carlos Sainz.
However, against the pace of Red Bull and especially Max Verstappen, who won the race comfortably despite starting from 14th on the grid, Mercedes had no chance, as Andrew Shovlin, the senior Mercedes race engineer, has to admit.
Mercedes: “More work to do than we thought”
“Congratulations to Max and Red Bull. He was in a different league today and could have won from anywhere with any strategy. It’s quite a shock how far up the field he was this weekend. We clearly have more work to do, than we thought. Let’s keep our fingers crossed that he’s not as fast on every track!”
“Overall it was a difficult weekend,” continues Shovlin. “We were hoping to take a step forward with our updates and it seems we are closer to Ferrari in terms of race pace but not Red Bull.”
“We struggled with the various compromises that the car has here, a lot more than in the races before the summer break, and that definitely made life harder for us. In many ways we learned from that because the car is on one A number of routes are not good enough and it is clear that we need to increase the working window,” he analyses.
Tire temperature still a big problem
Shovlin also criticizes the lack of pace in qualifying, as you even had to admit defeat there to the two Alpines: “We were weak on a fast lap – that’s another area we have to concentrate on.”
“With slightly warmer track temperatures today, we found it much easier to warm up the tires, but that’s a recurring issue in different conditions and at different tracks that we need to improve on.”
“We now have a few days to regroup and plan for Zandvoort. There are some similar challenges there with very fast corners so hopefully we can make some progress after analyzing the data from this weekend. “
Toto Wolff can’t cope with shape fluctuations
“It’s very difficult to deal with these fluctuations,” adds team boss Wolff. “We underperformed completely yesterday and fought against the Alpines, Albon was very strong, Valtteri would have been there too and probably Norris too and then in the race we were sometimes three seconds a lap faster than them.”
“So I think there are big question marks about what’s going on there. We’re not where we should be with the structure and knowledge to understand the racing car. We’re not doing that with this car,” Wolff puzzles .