In 2017 the Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton they found themselves battling on the track with Ferrari and Sebastian Vettel for two thirds of the championship, and on the occasion of that world championship fight Toto Wolff – head of the Anglo-German team – had baptized the W08 as a “diva“ due to the difficulties encountered in bringing the car into the perfect window of use. That term is back in vogue in this 2021, already in the winter tests, when the Austrian manager had described the W12 as “a little diva“. In fact, Mercedes did not start the season very well and Red Bull Honda immediately stepped forward with the aim of competing with authority for both world titles.
Lewis Hamilton recalled the work done to advance the W12: “The Bahrain tests were pretty bad for our standards. But we focused on how to improve it. The season has been quite confusing, in some races we were in front and in others very far and we never know how the car will behave before going to the track. The 2021 regulations certainly penalized us. We knew we would lose some downforce, but we realized that by virtue of this, all features of the car had changed. Everything we had been working on for several years has faded. I think we have been struggling with the most difficult car in terms of set-up and for this reason I did a lot of simulator tests. And the simulator just needs a little different parameter to get wrong data, it was a roller coaster ride “.
And so the seven-time world champion wanted to return to the nickname of ‘diva’: “Toto said one of our cars was a diva, but this is definitely a diva monster. Plus we have less time in free practice and therefore it was even more difficult to reach the right window and this can limit the potential. Being able to get it where we wanted it was very, very hard. In Brazil I got the car exactly how I wanted it, we literally hit the mark. And it happened once or twice this year. At Interlagos we have worked optimally, but most of the time we do not optimize the whole package. We need every possible thousandth, especially in our weak spots. We went into details and I’ve been busier than I’ve ever been. “, explained in an excerpt of the interview granted to The Race.
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