“That is certainly a big advantage”– Mercedes thinks that it has a strategic advantage over Red Bull ahead of the Sunday race.
Mercedes and Red Bull are having an intense battle this season, with the two taking their battle to another level in Silverstone. On Friday, Mercedes aced the qualifying.
While on Saturday, Max Verstappen’s sprint race win brought back Red Bull to the level field. Now, coming on Sunday, Mercedes has a reason to feel why they have an advantage over their rivals.
“I think we have pace, if Lewis would have held his position at the beginning I think we would have pretty much had the same race, just with a Mercedes in front,” commented Wolff.
“That means we are equal in performance, and with two cars right there you can split the strategies. You can go long, you can try overcutting, you can try undercutting by starting on different tires. That is certainly a big advantage.”
“It’s set up an interesting Grand Prix. It looks like tyre strategy can play a big part in these temperatures as well. So we will be aiming to fight back strong in the Grand Prix proper.”
Will take information from the sprint race.
Mercedes has also claimed that it would be extracting data from the sprint race, especially the tyre performance, which would help them formulate a tyre strategy.
“Having the sprint race today does make it a little easier to plan for tomorrow as you’ve got a clear idea of everyone’s pace and how the tyres are behaving so we have a bit of work this evening to take the maximum learning from that,” said Andrew Shovlin.
“Our goal was to come here, to win and to close the gap in the championship and I think from what we’ve seen over the last two days, that’s still an achievable target.”
