The “very odd” issue Mercedes is still unable to fix

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff admitted that his team still hasn’t got to the bottom of its issues running in hot temperatures after a triple-header of warm weather races saw the German squad walk away with just 18 points for its two drivers.

“It’s just very odd,” Wolff remarked on the Austrian TV station ORF after the Spanish Grand Prix at Barcelona. 

“We’re a huge organisation with thousands of people and still we can’t seem to understand how to keep a tyre in the right window when it’s hot. And when it’s cold – like in Las Vegas, when you need winter jackets – we’re super-quick. 

“Maybe we need a few racetracks in Greenland or Alaska…” 

Dominant throughout the hybrid era until the new ground-effect regulations were introduced in 2022, Mercedes has endured a rather more turbulent run since then, with a handful of peaks and rather a lot of troughs.

One characteristic which seems baked in over a succession of cars has been a tendency to perform well in cold temperatures, while tyre performance becomes difficult to manage once the mercury rises. 

George Russell finished on the podium four times in the first six races, his battling second place in Bahrain being something of an outlier given the desert location – but even then, conditions were cooler than you might expect as a consequence of the early evening time slot for qualifying and the race. 

Andrea Kimi Antonelli qualified on pole for the Miami sprint but, again, the temperatures were not as high as expected for Florida in early May.

The recent triple-header has been dictated by hot and sunny weather, particularly on race day in Barcelona where the track temperature peaked at 50C. In such conditions, Russell’s fourth place might seem like a good result, but he was well adrift of the leading group until the late-race safety car – as was Antonelli, whose engine issue prompted the course neutralisation. 

“I think every car has an intrinsic DNA, and that’s dialled in to the design,” said Wolff in his post-race press conference.

“I think that, even though we’re a large organisation with many scientists and engineers, sometimes you don’t know why a car is doing something. 

“I’m not sure McLaren knows exactly why they are so fast, because it comes down to just the marginal gains, and the detail, and just good engineering. I think that our car, generally over the years, was struggling more with the rear tyre overheating than others. 

“We were always very strong when it was cold, when that wasn’t an issue. If you look back at Las Vegas last year, from the first flying lap onwards, the drivers said, ‘the car is awesome, we have so much grip, like never before.’

“All of the other drivers were saying, there’s literally no grip, they’re sliding around. So you kind of see where that is certainly something which is intrinsic in the car, and you can mask or make worse with set-up directions, but it’s something that’s in the car.” 

Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images via Getty Images

Pirelli’s tyres have always been temperature-sensitive, particularly the rears. But the majority of teams have found this year’s compounds to be less prone to thermal degradation than before – a characteristic F1’s tyre supplier was asked to execute in the most recent ‘target letter.’ That makes Mercedes’ struggles all the more baffling.

Ahead of the Imola round it introduced a new rear-suspension spec with relocated pick-up points and slightly different geometry. In that race, though, performance didn’t meet expectations, so it reverted to the previous spec for Monaco and Spain. The Imola weekend also prompted a rethink about set-up direction. 

“I think the most important thing of these three races was we got the first couple pretty wrong on the way that we set the car up,” said chief technical officer James Allison in his regular post-race video debrief. 

“We asked too much of the rear axle, suffered badly as a consequence, and approached Barcelona with a different mindset.  

“And in a track which would have murdered our tyres if we’d gone at it like we did in Imola and Monaco, we were actually a bit more ourselves.” 

While thermal degradation is less severe on the current generation of Pirelli tyres, there is still an optimum temperature ‘window,’ and some teams are better at managing it than others. McLaren is the class leader, to the extent that Red Bull has persistently suggested foul play is involved, such as the use of so-called phase-change materials within the rear brake cowlings. 

Suspension geometry and driving technique are the more traditional means of managing tyre temperatures, and most teams set their cars up with an inherent understeer balance to prevent the rear axle sliding, which can cause the surface temperatures to spike. 

George Russell, Mercedes

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

There is no ‘magic bullet’ solution, though, which is why the cars more sympathetic to their rubber can struggle to reach the optimum working window in colder temperatures, where Mercedes thrives. 

Allison said the new approach will help in the races to come: “Knowing that we can do more of that and lean deeper into that in the races ahead, I think that’s a good thing.” 

Whether this is a solution that has been waiting to be found – a means of unlocking inherent performance in the car – or a sticking-plaster ‘fix’ for built-in flaws remains to be seen. 

“We need to now analyse the data and see whether we’ve unlocked a little bit of the potential, or solved a little bit of the problems,” said Wolff.