© Sulay Kelly for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
Toto Wolff says Mercedes was “two seconds quicker than our competition at times that George was pushing, and for the rest of the day he was just managing his pace”.
After claiming a dominant 1-2 at the Las Vegas Grand Prix, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff believes the team has found a “sweet spot” for their car.
“I think that clearly you can correlate where we’ve been, where we’ve been strong,” Wolff said.
“We’ve been strong in Silverstone, we’ve been strong in Spa and then here in Las Vegas.
“I think it’s just keeping the car in a sweet spot, the tyres in the optimum window. We were very, very quick.
“I mean, we were two seconds quicker than our competition at times that George was pushing and for the rest of the day, he was just managing his pace.”
In previous races Mercedes was sometimes very strong on Friday, but their performance would drop by the time qualifying began. In Las Vegas, however, they were strong throughout the whole weekend.
“This one is a really important result. You have locations over the weekend and then normally you can see where everything was here, that we’ve been not so good on in that session.
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“But here, every single session, we were ahead. So, lots of field paper that allow us to say, well, at least we know where the sweet spot is, this is where we need to be, and then trying to find out how we can hit that target more often.”
Asked whether Mercedes understands why they were able to keep the W15 in the ideal operating window, Toto said:
“Yeah, I think it kind of spirals into the bad zone when you break traction and then it’s hot.
“You kind of swing out of the window all the time, and when you break traction here, that was actually helpful to keep the temperature at the time.
“So clearly, there is an aspect that some teams really love the cold, and they expect a lot of performance.
“There’s some teams that are feeling so strong when it was hot in Singapore in the clouds and then they have dominated in the way they just controlled it in the way they wanted.
“So, yeah, it would be important to find a balance for next year,” the Austrian concluded.
