Mercedes has admitted that it had alarm bells ringing following the F1 Sprint at last weekend’s Sao Paulo Grand Prix.
Though George Russell finished fourth and Lewis Hamilton seventh in the Saturday encounter, it was a performance that raised concerns for Sunday’s race.
Those proved founded as Hamilton could do no better than eighth at the flag while Russell was forced into retirement with overheating issues.
Mercedes has typically performed well in Interlagos and long-run pace on Friday was promising.
“The long run pace we showed in free practice was quite reassuring,” explained Riccardo Musconi, Mercedes’ head of trackside performance.
“We didn’t think that we needed to change the car around, so we went into qualifying, and the results were around the third row.
“In a way, we were not pleased with it, and we felt the car deserved more.
“The alarm bells went out during the Sprint race because after the encouraging first two laps, the degradation of our car was quite high, mainly coming from the rear axle.
“At that stage we worried about our performance on the Sunday.
“We organised for a simulator session back at the factory, looking at the parameters we could change between Saturday and Sunday, as we are in parc fermé because it’s a Sprint weekend.
“That doesn’t leave us with many tools to play with,” he added.
“We were hoping that addressing some of the issues we experienced on Saturday, like pushing very hard on the first couple of laps, doing a bit more management and trimming a bit the balance of the car with the flap would have been enough to put us in a more comfortable position for Sunday.”
Those changes, though they made an improvement, created other issues and could not resolve the underlying problem.
“We improved the degradation a bit on the rear axle but at the same time we started suffering from understeer, so the car was struggling to turn the corners,” Musconi explained.
“The pace therefore wasn’t there and we couldn’t compete at the front.”
As a Sprint weekend, cars entered parc ferme on Friday afternoon, limiting what the teams could change beyond that.
Mercedes’ hands were tied to a large extent, with a pit lane start quickly dismissed.
“If we were changing the setup on Saturday night, we’d have to take a pitlane start on Sunday,” Musconi said.
“That means that you are released after all the cars are passed by the pit exit, you need to catch up to the back of the pack and cut through it which causes tyre degradation.
“So, for us from a strategical point of view, it was off the table.”
Mercedes went on to struggle in the race leading team boss Toto Wolff to describe the weekend as his worst in 13 years.
It meant Hamilton lost ground in his battle for second in the drivers’ championship to Sergio Perez, while Ferrari inched close in the constructors’ title fight.
Two rounds of the 2023 season remain, the next at Las Vegas on November 16-18, a week before the finale in Abu Dhabi.
