© Steve Etherington for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
Mercedes opted not to perform its filming day and first shakedown of the W12 ahead of pre-season testing. Toto Wolff says it has nothing to do with Mercedes’ troubles in testing.
Mercedes did not have a very successful three days of winter testing. One of the first problems that occurred was an issue with the gearbox that prevented Valtteri Bottas from performing in most of the day 1 morning session.
By the end of day 3 of testing, Mercedes was the team with the least amount of accumulated laps. Team boss Toto Wolff does not find this overly disturbing.
“I always worry, sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes for the wrong reasons, but 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 struggle in the first few days,” the Austrian explained to the official Formula 1 website.
Even Valtteri Bottas suggested the gearbox problem could have been detected sooner had Mercedes performed the first shakedown of the W12 ahead of testing. Wolff thinks otherwise.
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“It’s not a matter of complacency. There’s a reason why there are not many teams winning World Championships or doing it with consecutive championships.
“It’s an organisation that needs to stay energised and motivated at all times, and that’s not trivial.
“The shakedown, if it’s done in the right conditions, allows you to understand a little bit more, but our failures in the first days were not down to doing or not doing a shakedown.”
Wolff goes on to explain Mercedes’ next steps as they try to sort out the W12’s problems.
“On the job list is that we will crunch the data. Try to understand where we performed well, and where not, where we had good correlation to our simulations and the tunnel and where not, and just generally, it’s like sleeping overnight on an idea.
“Next day you wake up more intelligent,” concluded the Austrian.
