“We’re not as quick as Red Bull”- Mercedes claims that it is behind their biggest competitors on pace; will have to sort out the issue.
Mercedes showcased a numerous range of problems on a three-day-long pre-season test in Bahrain. It seemed like there were a few set of problems that need immediate fixation, but no potential crises were spotted.
Though, Mercedes now claims that it is behind Red Bull in pace after analysing there lap timing in Bahrain. Thus, Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin says that he needs to work out quickly.
“We’ve had another day with good reliability where we were able to run to plan throughout the day,” said the team’s engineering director on Sunday.
“Valtteri was doing long run-up work in the morning and Lewis doing a mix of long run work and qualifying work in the afternoon. We’ve made a bit of progress with the balance on higher fuel, and the car was more predictable, but we can see from the data we’ve collected over the last few days that on race pace, we’re not as quick as Red Bull.
“The lower fuel work was a more confusing picture, we didn’t gain enough, and we need to go and look at our approach as far too many cars were ahead of us on pace today.
“We’ve had issues in recent years with pace in winter testing and managed to make good progress before the first race, but we may have our work cut out this time.
“We’ve not got long before we’re back here for the race, so we’ve planned a programme of work to try and understand some of our issues and will be leaving no stone unturned in our efforts to find some more speed over the next ten days.”
Discovering issues is exciting.
This is not the first time when Mercedes have shown issues during the pre-season tests, but at the same time, these issues have been declared as the gravest. In the end, Toto Wolff says that it will be exciting to spot the issues.
“I always worry, sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes for the wrong reasons,” he said. “Pre-season testing is always exciting because you always find the hair in the soup, things that are not good, and we had quite some struggles in the first two days.”
