© Steve Etherington for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
Toto Wolff says one of the reasons why Mercedes performed better than usual at the Mexican Grand Prix Qualifying is because they “optimised” their engines for high altitude conditions.
Mercedes has long suffered at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez because of the track’s high altitude. However at this year’s Mexican Grand Prix Qualifying, the team apparently made a big stride forward.
Team boss Toto Wolff says the team’s performance shows that progress has been made.
“We have optimised it for these conditions,” the Austrian explained.
“At the end, you’re trying to extract power unit performance throughout the calendar, and the outliers are somehow difficult to take account for.
“But it’s more a tuning question. It’s not that we’ve put the engine upside down. It’s just we better understand why it didn’t perform in high altitude.”
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However Wolff admits he didn’t expect Mercedes would qualify ahead of Red Bull.
“We were all surprised. It was pretty obvious that Max would take pole, and that it would be a fight between us and Checo for the other positions.
“Then we could see that qualifying really came towards us. On the medium, we started really to outperform them, and at no point in Q3 did they have a lead on any of the laps.
“Also I believe that in the last lap, they were behind. So yeah, that makes the sport for me so fascinating, that from one session to the other performance can swing.
“We’ve seen it to our detriment in Austin, and now it has happened to our advantage here in Mexico,” the Austrian concluded.
