Toto Wolff says the “minor” 2021 rule changes felt for Mercedes “like starting the season with new regulations, contrary to what some of our competitors had”.
It’s no secret that the 2021 regulation changes, although somewhat minor, had a very big impact on Mercedes. The changes heavily favoured high-rake cars like Red Bull’s at the expense of low-rake ones like Mercedes’
Toto Wolff says the team at first mistakenly thought they could easily recover the lost downforce.
“When the regulation change happened pretty early in the 2020 season, we thought that we can crawl it back in terms of downforce,” the Austrian told Motorsport.
“But it appears that in relative performance we didn’t catch up as much as we thought we could.
“So we started the season expecting to be catching up, but then obviously we had these early successes.
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“Looking at Bahrain, we probably shouldn’t have won the race on pure car pace, but we did. And since the beginning of the season we were always with a slight deficit, apart from maybe Barcelona and Portimao.”
Wolff goes on to say these “minor” rule changes felt like completely new regulations to Mercedes.
“I think this year has been for us, rediscovering the sweet spot of the car.
“All these years we run the car around a certain configuration, and when suddenly the downforce loss happened on the rear end of the floor, we just needed to rediscover it and find the performance elsewhere.
“We had good weekends and worse weekends, but for us it was really like starting the season with new regulations, contrary to what some of our competitors had,” the Austrian concluded, obviously pointing at teams whose concepts’ were favoured by he rules.