Toto Wolff says Mercedes has to remain on the ground despite upswing in F1, as they will revert to their new update at Zandvoort.
Having had a solid run in the lead-up to the summer break, Wolff notes that Mercedes has to remain on ground and realistic still. Yes, they have had a breakthrough due to the latest run of updates, but they have to be careful with optimism.
After a dry run, Mercedes has three wins in the last four rounds and six podiums on the bounce which has put them in the top end fight with Red Bull, McLaren and Ferrari. But Wolff doesn’t wish to take the high road still as there is much to do.
“We need to remain both feet on the ground,” said Wolff to media. “The swings of performance, you see a trend definitely that’s positive on our side. With some other teams, you see a negative trend, but I don’t think we should really pre-empt how the second half of the season is going to go.
“I think it’s a tough fight, there are four teams that are giving it everything. So I think we can be carefully optimistic. But we’ve got to prove it, it’s 10 races to go. We made a drastic change in order to recover some of the performance, but we believe it wasn’t the floor. So it would be quite interesting when we put everything on the car in Zandvoort.
“And then correlate and see what one does and the other…then we can be sure whether it’s the mechanical bit that we thought or if there’s few interactions aerodynamically and mechanically that didn’t work,” summed up Wolff.
Andrew Shovlin expanded on Mercedes dropping its upgrade in Belgium seeing the data, while noting that they should be back to its new spec in Zandvoort. “We are planning to do that [re-install the updates],” he said. T’he reason we reverted the car to the Silverstone spec on Friday night in Belgium was because we had a good race in Silverstone.
“Spa and Silverstone are not dramatically different circuits in terms of the corner speed range that you are dealing with. We had clearly introduced some problems somewhere. We think that was largely due to how we were running the car in Spa, not induced by the updates themselves.
“That was giving us a bit of bouncing in the high-speed corners, as well as a few issues with the balance. Going to that Silverstone car got it all back to normal. We have since had time to look at the data to understand what it was that we did, and we are pretty confident that we will be going for a reintroduction in Zandvoort.”
Here’s Mercedes pair on questions raised before breakthrough
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Here’s Toto Wolff on not being worried about Andrea Kimi Antonelli
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