Mercedes upgrades fail to deliver at Sepang

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff admits Mercedes’ upgrades appear to have hurt the team’s competitiveness after it failed to set a top three time in qualifying for the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia.

Developments brought to Sepang were predicted to give Mercedes around three tenths of a second in terms of a lap time gain, but the team was suffering from significant tire degradation on Friday. While the drivers suggested that was a set-up issue at the time – and the picture looked far more competitive in FP3 – there was an apparent backward step in qualifying as Kimi Antonelli was fourth fastest and George Russell eighth.

“Very difficult to understand,” Wolff told Sky Sports. “We have been caught out a little bit on Friday with some car behavior that we didn't see all year. But then you can say it's very hot and the tarmac is very different to all the tracks. Looked really good in the morning [on Saturday] – we seemed to have, at least with Kimi, made a step in understanding. And then qualifying was a little bit back to what we saw before. Just no performance.

“It looks like we are very draggy because it's the first time that we're losing a lot of time on the straights, to especially Max [Verstappen]. And then through the low speed, in Turn 2 we are not able to turn the car, there’s just too much understeer. So overall, things we haven't seen all year.”

Wolff insists Mercedes was not trying to hide pace at any stage of the weekend and was simply trying to understand its new package, particularly given the unique challenges of the heat and track surface in Malaysia.

“Something else is going on, and we have to understand” he said. “This is now working through the data and putting our heads together because we still believe that the upgrade works. We just need to understand why not here.

“It's so different [as a track]. But nevertheless, in any case, you're expecting three tenths to kick in, and it looks like three or four or five-tenths backwards. First time we miss out on the top three by quite a chunk. So odd. But I guess we will find a solution.”

With Russell saying the numbers suggest a gain in performance from the upgrade but the lap times say otherwise, Antonelli warns against judging the new components too quickly.

“That's the question we'll try to answer as quickly as possible, because the team has done a tremendous job on bringing this upgrade, but probably the window of the way the car operates is completely different,” Antonelli said. “And to be fair, the whole year, whenever we went on tracks like this, with very open tarmac, we've always struggled.

“So is it because of the tarmac and because it's so hot out there? Or is it because maybe we're missing something with the new package? It's really hard to understand, but we'll try to do our best, and probably Singapore will give us a better read on the package.”