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“Something we need to work out”– Mercedes has convincing theory about their Azerbaijan debacle

Tanish Chachra
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"Something we need to work out"– Mercedes has convincing theory about their Azerbaijan debacle

“Something we need to work out”– Mercedes got a convincing theory explaining their failure during the Azerbaijan race last weekend.

Mercedes on last Sunday had a tough outing in Azerbaijan, as they failed to score even a single point from the race, a huge setback for their title race against Red Bull.

Mercedes’ management already knew that they would be struggling in Azerbaijan, but to this extent, they never imagined. But over this also Mercedes technology director Mike Elliot has a convincing theory explaining what went wrong.

“We went into this weekend knowing we were going to have some issues but probably not quite expecting to be where we were come P2 on Friday,” he said in the team’s regular post-race video debrief.

“What we put in place was a series of tests to try and get more understanding. And actually out of that have come a couple of theories, one that is really promising.”

“Unfortunately, the test that we did didn’t happen until FP3, and it was after we had done the long runs, so while we found good pace for qualifying, we probably didn’t get the best setup around that for the race weekend and the actual race itself.”

“This is something we need to look at. [It’s] something we need to work out how we can build the setup around the changes we’ve made and then carry that forward into future race weekends where we have similar issues.”

“The other thing to bear in mind is both this circuit and Monaco are probably outliers and actually we’d hope not to have some of the issues we’ve had in the next couple of races. Fingers crossed; we will be in a better position.”

Struggled to warm tyres up

Elliot then remarked one of Mercedes biggest problems this weekend was struggling to warm up the tyres sufficiently. Meanwhile, according to him, Valtteri Bottas was never in the position.

“I think at this circuit one of the difficulties is getting the warm-up of the front tyre, and it is also a circuit where you need to have real confidence. The walls are really close and if you get it wrong you are going to put it into the wall,” he explained.

“Those two things kind of go together because if you can go a little bit quicker, if you can get yourself a little bit closer to the wall because you are confident, then you get a bit more heat into the tyres because you have got more duty.”

“If you get more heat into the tyres you get a bit more grip and you can go faster. So you end up with this sort of positive spiral that I mentioned before.”

“If I look at the weekend, I think Lewis found a little step in FP3 with setup and that seemed to help him find a little bit more from the car,” he added.

“All of a sudden we went from struggling a bit, to being really in the front runners on the pace and Lewis took that all the way through qualifying. The lap he set in Q3 to be second, it wasn’t one lap. He was actually quick all through qualifying.”

“With Valtteri, I think Valtteri just didn’t get to that position. He didn’t find that, sort of, last little bit of confidence to be in that positive spiral in the same way.”

About the author

Tanish Chachra

Tanish Chachra

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Tanish Chachra is the Motorsport editor at The SportsRush. He saw his first race when F1 visited India in 2011, and since then, his romance with the sport has been seasonal until he took up this role in 2020. Reigniting F1's coverage on this site, Tanish has fallen in love with the sport all over again. He loves Kimi Raikkonen and sees a future world champion in Oscar Piastri. Away from us, he loves to snuggle inside his books.

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