Mercedes spoke about why the car didn’t start and George Russell’s PU situation, admitting he felt unwell after the F1 Brazilian Grand Prix.
It wasn’t the weekend Mercedes wanted to see at the F1 GP in Brazil, especially a year after George Russell’s stunning win. After a good start, the team was unable to get into a sprint. They left the field and only scored a few points.
The car also suffered a significant drop in performance in the main race, with Lewis Hamilton only finishing eighth and Russell retiring due to a hot engine. The team stated that this was the last race for the power unit, according to the listing.
Russell will have a different power unit in Las Vegas and Abu Dhabi, but it is unclear whether it will be a new one or removed from the pool. Reflecting on the weekend, Mercedes manager Riccardo Musconi admitted that his team did not perform well on Monday.
However, they recovered and focused on analyzing the reasons for the lack of performance. Mercedes had good pace on Friday and the car felt good, but on Saturday they couldn’t pick up the pace and had an unexpected situation in the sprint.
They found that the main cause of deterioration was the rear axle. On Saturday night they had a simulator session to do everything they could to help with the changes heading into Sunday. Power loss improved slightly, but the car started having problems in corners.
Low feeling –
Mercedes: “Honestly, when I woke up on Monday morning, I felt a little bad after the weekend. But I put it aside and tried to keep a positive vibe and attitude. You have to find out and approach your work in a way that brings out the best in you each day. At this team, we believe that bad experiences make us stronger. That’s why. We’re going to try to get as much as we can from this weekend. We’ve already gathered all the information and tried to gather it, but we’re going to spend the next few days trying to understand what went wrong at Interlagos. I’m going to work hard on it.”
I could have done what I could have done over the weekend –
Mercedes: “The long-distance pace I showed in free practice was quite encouraging. I went into qualifying thinking that I didn’t need to change cars, and I ended up in about the third row. In a way, we weren’t happy with it and felt the car deserved more. The alarm bells went off during the sprint race, after we felt energized in the first two laps. Our car had deteriorated quite a bit, mainly due to the rear axle. At this point we were worried about our performance on Sunday, as we had organized a simulator session at the factory and were in parc fermé for the sprint weekend. , I checked the parameters that can be changed between Saturday and Sunday.
“That doesn’t leave us with many tools to play with. We were hoping that would be enough to address some of the issues we had on Saturday, including: B. The first few By pushing really hard on the laps, having a little more control and improving the car’s balance a little bit with the flaps, we were able to put ourselves in a more comfortable position going into Sunday. , the conditions were quite gloomy, similar to Saturday. The deterioration of the rear axle improved slightly, but at the same time understeer began to occur, making it difficult to turn corners.
“So we lacked the pace and couldn’t keep up with the leaders. Have you considered changing the car’s set-up? Well, we’re in parc fermé with sprint regulations all weekend. If you change your setup on Saturday evening, you will have to start from the pit lane on Sunday. This means that all cars will be released after they have passed the pit exit. They will catch up to the back of the field and We have to break through there and that leads to tire deterioration. So from a strategic point of view, that was unexpected for us.”
Russell Drive Unit –
Mercedes: “In short, yes. George will use different power units for the next two races, as originally planned. The power unit used at Interlagos will be the same for his It was supposed to be his last race weekend. So why did we retire his car? It was seeing some pretty worrying pressures and temperatures, to the point where we were pretty sure it was going to fail soon. To avoid possible fire or damage to other parts of the vehicle, the logical conclusion was to take the vehicle out of circulation. He plans to use a different power unit for the last two races, so from that point of view it’s fine. ”
This is a look back at the Brazilian Grand Prix, where the Mercedes trio suffered a crushing defeat
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