Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has admitted the cool weather at pre-season testing has shrouded whether the team has resolved its Formula 1 car’s sensitivity to hot conditions.
The German marque experienced an inconsistent campaign in 2024 with a W15 challenger whose competitiveness was dependent on the temperatures prevalent.
Mercedes managed four victories, three of which came at Silverstone, Spa and Las Vegas – where George Russell led a 1-2 – when the conditions were on the colder side.
However, the traits that made the W15 so potent in such circumstances would be detrimental when the temperature rose as it would encounter problems with overheating.
Mercedes revealed at the W16’s launch how that is one area the team has paid attention to addressing over the winter as it targets more consistent performance this season.
But the uncharacteristically cool conditions – including drizzle – in Bahrain this week have made it tougher for Mercedes to decipher whether it has cured that particular gremlin.
When asked about what it had learned on that front with the abnormal temperatures, Wolff quipped to media including Motorsport Week: “Well, I’m a bit worried at the moment because that should be conditions where we should be two seconds quicker than everybody else!
“[That] was the only highlight last year in terms of performance in Las Vegas and we are not [that far ahead of the rest].
“So, either we’ve remedied the problem and we are more balanced through all the climate conditions or not.
“We’ve had a laugh about it, whether we lost some of that USP. We shall see. I don’t know.”
How F1 teams can eliminate variables using data
Aston Martin boss Andy Cowell highlighted that there are tools at the teams’ disposal that allow them to eliminate variables such as wind gusts once the numbers are crunched.
“The wind and the conditions that we’ve got here affect the driver’s instantaneous experience of the car,” he pinpointed.
“So within the data, we can strip that wind variation out, but for driver feedback, it’s challenging for them.”
Russell alluded to that as he commented that Mercedes’ goal is to calculate “what could have been if the temperature was 20 degrees hotter” or if the wind is “different”.
READ MORE – George Russell: Mercedes ‘looking forwards, not backwards’ without Lewis Hamilton
