Riccardo Musconi, responsible for Mercedes’ performance, returned to the difficult Interlagos weekend, defined by Toto Wolff as “the team’s worst weekend since 2013”. Post-race analysis highlighted how the direction taken by the engineers after the free practice session was completely wrong, and despite an extra session organized on the Brackley simulator after the sprint race, it was not possible to find a way out.
“The pace in the long run we made in free practice on Friday morning was quite reassuring – explained Musconi – the car seemed good to us, so we didn’t change much and went into qualifying. We found ourselves on the third row and we weren’t fully satisfied, we thought we could achieve something more, but the alarm bells went off during the sprint race. After the first two laps completed at an encouraging pace, the degradation of our car (especially on the rear axle) remained high. At that point we were worried about Sunday’s race, so we organized a simulator session at the factory, looking at the parameters we could change between Saturday and Sunday, given that we were in parc fermé and there’s not much that could be done. can change.”
Photo by: Red Bull Content Pool
Sergio Perez, Red Bull Racing RB19, George Russell, Mercedes W14
“We hoped to be able to resolve some of the problems encountered in the sprint race – continued Musconi – but what emerged from Sunday’s 71 laps was a rather bleak picture, similar to our Saturday. We improved the degradation on the rear axle a little but at the same time we started to suffer from understeer, so the car struggled to enter the corners.”
Musconi confirmed that the engineers had also considered the idea of violating parc fermé before the Grand Prix in order to intervene on the setup. “This would have obviously helped us, but starting from the pit lane would have meant having to catch up with the group and rejoin the group, and this would have led to further problems with the tyres. So from a strategic point of view, it was out of the question. Among the aspects we examined in the debriefing was the choice of having been too conservative with the heights of the car. It’s all tied to what happened in Austin and part of the answer may be there, but we don’t think that explains the full picture of what we saw over the weekend.”
A little good news in a terrible weekend for Mercedes is that relating to the power unit that forced George Russell to retire. The engine was on the last race in the rotation schedule, so it will not impact the final two weekends of the season. “I confirm that George already had the use of other power units in the original plan – concluded Musconi – the Interlagos engine was in its last race weekend. We started to see some pretty worrying pressures and temperatures and got to a point where we were convinced it was about to fail. At that point, to avoid a possible fire that would have caused damage to other parts of the single-seater, we decided to withdraw the car.”
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