Mercedes F1 are hoping to make further progress with a new upgrade package arriving in Austin, with the team’s technical director James Allison saying the new features will be crucial for the Brackley outfit as the season draws to a close.
“We’re going to try to understand how to mitigate what we lacked this weekend, how to make the tyres work better on these overheated circuits, and we’re also going to do a lot of work to fine-tune our final evolution of the season.” Allison said.
“We have quite a big package with new things for the car in Austin that we hope will allow us to have a decent weekend, so we need to deliver all that and get ready for these last races of the year.”
Drivers were frustrated with the Mercedes’ performance, and Allison understands: “I think, like all of us, they’re fed up with the car not being particularly competitive in race trim.”
“It was good in qualifying, but not in the race. We suffered again from a problem that is specific to us, namely that with softer compounds on circuits where the temperature of the tyres is very high, where it is very easy to overheat, we lose our relative competitiveness.”
“And Singapore is at the very edge of that experience, which was quite difficult for them to deal with. And to make matters worse, 30 degrees Celsius, 70% relative humidity, it was very hot in the car and by the end of the race they were both feeling it.”
“They feel a lot better now in terms of the heat, you know. An ice bath and a few drinks and they recover relatively quickly, but the main thing is that the pace of the car makes them suffer a little longer.”
Allison admits that qualifying on the second row suggested the weekend was going to be more positive than expected on Friday, but was actually an anomaly compared to the overall standard of the W15 in Singapore.
“I think Sunday’s result was quite difficult for the team, and Friday was perhaps a precursor to what we could expect in terms of difficulty. The anomaly was Saturday, where we managed to go from a difficult Friday to a very respectable grid position.”
“And here I have to give credit to the factory team, who really helped to turn around a difficult Friday, to put us much higher up the grid than Friday might have suggested and to give us a result which, although disappointing, was not disastrous in any way.”
“I would say the trade-off we made, albeit unintentionally, is that we improved the car for every lap, for qualifying, but it was quite painful then on the long runs.”
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