Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has pondered whether the team’s dismal race in Formula 1’s Dutch Grand Prix was down to its new floor on the car not working as desired.
The German marque entered the season’s resumption in a positive mood amid an uptick in competitiveness which had witnessed it attain two victories in three races.
However, Mercedes was unable to maintain that positive momentum as a wretched race saw George Russell trail home a distant seventh, with Lewis Hamilton eighth.
Russell, who qualified third, had expressed optimism that he could be in win contention, but he slipped back and ended up reverting to a two-stop with his team-mate.
Wolff reckons the drastic downturn in Mercedes’ pace since its revival in Canada indicates there was a greater factor involved than track characteristics or conditions.
“I think the car, these cars are sometimes a surprise box,” Wolff told media including Motorsport Week.
“We had six podiums in a row, and that doesn’t look like the car that three weeks ago was first and second. At least first on merit.
“You can’t really end up with a result like this without any major factor playing in it. It’s something we need to analyse in the next few days to Monza.
“Was it because we put something on the car that didn’t help? Did we engineer something into the car that wasn’t good?
“How do you justify these swings in performance, that sometimes look really good this weekend and then today, that was tons of degradation. Not very impressive.”
Mercedes elected to use the revised floor at Zandvoort that it abandoned running in Belgium, but rain disrupting practice meant that the team obtained minimal data.
“I think it was two factors,” he explained. “We back-to-back the update kit on Friday, which was very, at the end, left us with not a lot of data.
“The update kit that we put onto the car in Spa on Friday, and then took off again.
“And then obviously with the lack of running, like everybody else, maybe we didn’t decide the right things for the car.
“So there could be a few factors at play that contributed to this performance.”
Wolff hasn’t ruled out the floor being behind Mercedes’ unexpected setback as he is convinced that an unsuitable set-up wasn’t enough to explain its lacklustre pace.
“I don’t want to jump to conclusions too quickly, because we’re going to look at it in the coming days, and hopefully try to find clues in the data,” he said about the floor.
“Like I said before, was it the set-up, was it the track, what is it that we got wrong? Was it the floor that we put on the car? Was it all of this together?
“So hopefully we can sort it out until Monza and become competitive.
“But the swing in performance between P1, P2 and P7, P8, there’s a biggie in there. It’s not something that was a simple set-up decision in my opinion.”
