© Steve Etherington for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
Mercedes’ technical director Mike Elliott says Mercedes’ 2021 car was not “a disaster”, it’s just that the performance gap was “much smaller”.
Much has been written about the issues Mercedes had with their car in the early stages of the 2021 season. The problems started in pre-season testing, when it became obvious that the W12 is not as dominant as Mercedes’ previous cars.
However, Mike Elliott says the car didn’t have any unusual issues that were not encountered in previous years.
“To be honest, I didn’t think we were as far off as the timing might have suggested,” Elliott told Autosport.
“The problem is in winter testing, you don’t know who’s running on what fuel levels or what programmes they are running.
“Last year, I don’t think we had a crisis of ‘the car’s a disaster and we need to sort these things out’.
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“I think it was the usual things you go through, getting on top of the tyres, working out what’s your optimum set-up for your car and how could we squeeze a little bit more out.
“To be honest, the whole season has been a bit like that. You know, how can you just find those little extra bits and pieces that are going to keep bringing you small dividends as you go along?
“It’s difficult to know what the other cars are doing, what their aero [development] trackers look like, and how they are finding it.
“But we found that once we took the hit for the regulation changes, we actually got a really steep development slope, which is kind of what you expect when the car is being really unsettled.
“Our bigger issue was more that developments flattened out fairly quickly. And what I don’t know is, for our competitors, whether they took less of a hit, or whether actually their development slope carried on a bit further than ours did.”
Elliott goes a step further and says the team’s 2019 challenger was much harder to optimise, but other teams were too far behind performance wise, so it wasn’t as noticeable.
“I think 2019 we definitely had a car that was on a sort of knife edge. And it was difficult to set up. I don’t think the problem of the car was anywhere near as big [in 2021] as it was in 2019.
“I think the problem is the overall performance gap is just much smaller. And so, as a consequence of that, a tenth here or a tenth there certainly puts you from being in front to being behind.
“I think in previous years, when we’ve had a car that is three or four tenths up the road, sometimes more, sometimes less, if you turned up at a track and you didn’t get the last couple of tenths out of set-up, it didn’t matter. You just didn’t have the gap you had before.
“Whereas I think it’s very clear we have had the biggest competition we’ve had in years and years and years,” the Briton concluded.
