The Mercedes AMG F1 team has not been at their best in the last two years. Be it their on-track pace or their pit stops, the Silver Arrows faltered in both these sectors. As Toto Wolff’s team is doing their best to cover up the gap to Red Bull in terms of performance, they are also investing massively to improve their pit stop timing to keep the pressure on the Milton Keynes outfit.
Statistically, Mercedes has been one of the poorest teams when it comes to their pit stop timing. Firstly, they didn’t have enough pace to compete with Red Bull, and on top of that, their slow pit stop also hampered their race results throughout the season, something they didn’t witness during their prime years.
According to Wolff, the delays in pit stops were not because of any human error. It was primarily related to the use of equipment. At a time when Red Bull and McLaren turned all the heads with their rapid pit stops, Lewis Hamilton and Co. were doing stops over 3 seconds or more, case in point at the 2023 United States Grand Prix.
Wolff and his team acknowledged this and now doing everything they can to rectify this weakness. Kemal Sengul from Motorsport Turkey reported on this as per deni on X, “After the problems in recent years, they have focused a lot on pit stops. It’s very possible that we will see a much better Mercedes at pit stops in the upcoming season.”
Mercedes and their pit stop delays
Going by the statistics, Mercedes had two pitstops of 3.6 and 3.4 seconds. Compared to them, Red Bull had 2.4 and 2.5 seconds. Together, the Austrian team saved 2.1 seconds in just pit stops. In the end, this mattered a lot as Hamilton finished the COTA race behind Max Verstappen and the difference was 2.2 seconds.
Addressing this, Wolff said according to Motorsport, “We need to avoid very slow pitstops. And it’s coming to a situation now where we realize that it has got so competitive, and we just need to ramp up our game up there. That’s in terms of equipment and science around it, and the way we are set up, to avoid 3 or 3.5 seconds pitstops because all of that played a part.”
How does Mercedes need to get the better of the magnificent Red Bull crew?
Red Bull are mighty when it comes to performing fine pitstops. Be it performing the stop in pitch-dark situations or on zero gravity, they are always a notch above others. They are also usually the fastest team when it comes to average pit stop timing and had the fastest timing [1.82 seconds at the 2019 Brazilian GP] under their belt until it was taken by McLaren last season.
To showcase their grip on pit stops, Christian Horner’s team recently performed some stops under pitch-dark conditions. There were ten attempts and with every attempt, the Red Bull crew got better. The first attempt was 8.84 seconds and after all ten attempts, they achieved a time of 2.84 seconds!
This was staggering given how they performed the stop in pitch-dark conditions and the crew was wearing black visors so that they didn’t get to see anything. Red Bull crew took it as a challenge and performed better than the Mercedes crew who were in broad daylight in COTA.
Jonathan Wheatley, Red Bull’s sporting director praised the team’s immense achievement and lauded them for pulling off a stop that was even race-worthy. This shows that Mercedes needs to have their work cut out if they are to catch Red Bull in terms of pit stops. As for Verstappen and Co, they will also be out to snatch their fastest pit stop record from McLaren, after it was taken from them in Qatar last year.
