F1 | Mercedes: qualifying exposes the defects of the W15

The Suzuka weekend so far has been two-sided for Mercedes. On Friday he had the illusion of being able to stay ahead of the McLarens and compete with Ferrari, but a nice cold shower arrived in qualifying, with Lewis Hamilton and George Russell who found themselves tied to seventh and ninth place on the starting grid of the Japanese Grand Prix.

In particular, Russell explained that he paid dearly for a mistake, without which he probably would have even tried to attack the second row. However, the Briton was also very clear in explaining what the limits of the W15 are at the moment: the Brackley team's single-seater runs into difficulty in fast corners and the situation gets worse when it's time to do the time attack, with little fuel. on board, when travel speeds increase further.

“Before the session we predicted a gap of around a tenth between us, Ferrari, McLaren and Aston Martin. When it comes to a qualifying lap, get it right or get it wrong, nowadays it can do the trick. difference of even six positions. I was doing a very good lap, with a gap of 0″25 at turn 11 and I expected to finish with a 0″4 disadvantage. Then I made a small mistake and lost a lot. It was a too bad,” Russell explained in reference to the way today's ninth place developed.

Then he went on to analyze what doesn't work on the W15: “We know the strengths and weaknesses of our car. The weakest are the high-speed corners. When it comes to qualifying, you reduce the amount of fuel and the corners they become faster and faster. So for us the situation gets even worse. We are carrying out more drastic tests to try to improve this aspect, because the car behaves well at low and medium speed. But we are very far away in the high-speed corners.”

“In the race, however, the corners are probably taken at about 30 km/h less, so the high speed ones become almost medium speed. So now we have to understand how to reverse the situation, but it's good that this problem has been exposed at this early stage of the season. Unfortunately, due to the nature of this calendar, we had three high-speed circuits in a row. If we had started the season with Bahrain, Baku and Singapore, the picture of our performances would probably have been very different.” he concluded.