© Jiri Krenek for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
Mercedes’ Toto Wolff and Andrew Shovlin explain why the team will reintroduce its new floor in Zandvoort, despite experiencing issues in Belgian Grand Prix practice.
Ahead of the Belgian Grand Prix weekend, Mercedes announced numerous upgrades for the W15, among them a new floor.
However, after disappointing Friday free practice sessions, the team decided to ditch the upgraded floor for their previous spec version.
While the improved performance was not obvious in Qualifying, in the race the team managed to pull off a fantastic 1-2 victory.
After the race, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff said the team thinks their lack of pace on Friday had nothing to do with their upgrades.
Now, he explains the upgraded floor will be reintroduced after the summer break at Zandvoort.
“I think we made a drastic change in order to recover some of the performance, but we believe it wasn’t the floor,” the Austrian said.
“It will be quite interesting when we put everything on the car in Zandvoort and correlate, and see what it does.
“Then we can be sure whether it’s the mechanical bit that we thought, or if there are few interactions aerodynamically and mechanically that didn’t work,” Wolff concluded.
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The team’s Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin explains the team has examined the data gathered at Spa, and they believe the upgrades can be reintroduced.
“The reason that we removed them, and we essentially reverted the car to the Silverstone spec on Friday, was because we had a good race in Silverstone,“ the Briton said.
“Spa and Silverstone are not dramatically different circuits in terms of the corner speed range that you’re dealing with.
“We’d clearly introduced some problems somewhere. We think that was largely due to how we were running the car in Spa, not induced by the updates themselves.
“That was obviously giving us a bit of bouncing in the high-speed corners, a few issues with the balance. Going to that Silverstone car got it all back to normal.
“We’ve since had time to look at the data to understand what it was we did exactly and knowing that, we’re pretty confident that we’ll be going for a reintroduction in Zandvoort,” Shovlin concluded.
