George Russell has detailed how low-fuel runs exaggerate the problems that Mercedes is tackling after he qualified ninth for tomorrow’s Formula 1 Japanese Grand Prix.
Russell wound up the slowest of the drivers from the top teams represented in Q3, over two-tenths behind his team-mate Lewis Hamilton, who ended two places higher.
But the Briton rued an error in the middle sector on his last run that prevented him from an improvement that would have leapt him several positions up the pecking order.
“I think we predicted before the session for it to be a tenth between ourselves, Ferrari, McLaren and Aston,
“And when it comes to that one lap in qualifying and you nail it or you don’t quite nail it, these days it’s six positions.
“I was on a really strong lap 2.5 tenths up by Turn 11 and maybe expecting to finish four tenths ahead, made one small mistake, and lost all the time and that was a bit of a shame.”
Mercedes had arrived this weekend primed to struggle as it continues to combat a high-speed cornering deficit that the iconic Suzuka circuit was expected to expose.
With the German marque lagging as the fifth-fastest team over one lap, Russell pinpointed how the decreased lap times with reduced fuel serve to accentuate its deficit.
“But we know the strengths and weaknesses of our car, the weaknesses are the high-speed corner,” he continued.
“Qualifying you take the fuel out and the corners are becoming faster and faster and faster, so the pace naturally goes away from us a bit.
“Unfortunately just with the nature of this calendar, we’ve had three circuits in a row that are all high-speed.
“If we started the season Bahrain, Baku and Singapore we’d probably be talking a very different picture for us.”
Asked if Mercedes had a grasp on its issues, Russell said: “I think so, we’re doing more drastic test items at the moment, to try and get on top of this high-speed performance.
“The car is correlating well in the low speed and the medium speed, but we’re a long way off in the high speed compared to what we’re seeing back at base, so we need to get on top of that.
“When you get to qualifying and the fuel comes out the speeds are going higher and higher that runs away from us slightly, whereas in the race you’re probably going around the corners 30 kph slower in the high speed, which brings it back to a medium speed rather than a high-speed corner, so we need to understand that.
“[But] it’s good that it’s been exposed at the beginning of the season.”
However, Russell admits that solving the correlation problem it retains between the simulator readings and on-track competitiveness at high speed is another matter.
“We see on the data what’s happening, how to solve that is another question, so we’ve had a few different specifications, aerodynamically, on the car these first four races.
“Certainly the one we’ve had in the last two weeks has been a little bit more consistent, but inherently in the car we’re missing something in the high speed.
“A shame because I think we can be much more competitive if we’re there, Bahrain we were qualifying P3, race we were on course for P2 before the engine problem, so time will tell.”
Russell predicts tomorrow’s race could be a fascinating affair with the compounds that each team has preserved at one of the highest degradation tracks on the calendar.
“It will be interesting tomorrow, if you look at the tyres remaining we’ve got two Hards and a Medium, I think Ferrari and Red Bull only have one Hard, Fernando [Alonso] only has one Hard, [and] one Medium, so he has to do one stint on the Soft, so there’s going to be a lot of variety between the top 10 cars.”
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