© Sulay Kelly for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
After a disappointing Dutch Grand Prix, Toto Wolff says Mercedes’ “swing in performance between P1, P2 [at Spa] and P7, P8 [at Zandvoort], is “not something that was a simple set-up decision”.
After three very successful races, Mercedes returned from the summer break and delivered an underwhelming performance at the Dutch Grand Prix.
After the race team boss Toto Wolff said the drop in performance cannot be explained by set-up decisions or track conditions, but it has to be something greater than that.
“I think the car, these cars are sometimes a surprise box,” the Austrian said.
“We had six podiums in a row, and that doesn’t look like the car that three weeks ago was first and second. At least first on merit.
“You can’t really end up with a result like this without any major factor playing in it. It’s something we need to analyse in the next few days to Monza.
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“Was it because we put something on the car that didn’t help? Did we engineer something into the car that wasn’t good?
“How do you justify these swings in performance, that sometimes look really good this weekend and then today, that was tons of degradation. Not very impressive.”
Toto hinted that the problem might have to do with the team’s recent upgrades, including the new floor that they introduced in Belgian Grand Prix free practice sessions, but then decided to take it off ahead of Qualifying.
“I think it was two factors. We back-to-back the update kit on Friday, which was very, at the end, left us with not a lot of data.
“The update kit that we put onto the car in Spa on Friday, and then took off again.
“And then obviously with the lack of running, like everybody else, maybe we didn’t decide the right things for the car.
“So there could be a few factors at play that contributed to this performance.”
However, the Austrian doesn’t want to jump to any conclusions before a serious analysis has been done by the team.
“I don’t want to jump to conclusions too quickly, because we’re going to look at it in the coming days, and hopefully try to find clues in the data.
“Like I said before, was it the set-up, was it the track, what is it that we got wrong? Was it the floor that we put on the car? Was it all of this together?
“So hopefully we can sort it out until Monza and become competitive. But the swing in performance between P1, P2 and P7, P8, there’s a biggie in there.
“It’s not something that was a simple set-up decision in my opinion,” Wolff concluded.
