Mercedes have promised a “substantial” final upgrade of their 2024 car when the Formula 1 season resumes at the United States Grand Prix late in the month of October for the season’s final six races.
In Singapore last weekend, the Silver Arrows’ patchy campaign took a “painful” turn as their promising second-row grid positions gave way to a fight that saw them finish fourth and sixth, one minute behind Lando Norris’s winning McLaren.
Having registered only one podium finish in the four races since the summer break, Mercedes appear to have lost out on a realistic chance of salvaging a top-three place in the Constructors’ Championship – where they have ended every season since finishing fifth in 2012 – having now dropped back to 112 points behind third-placed Ferrari.
Toto Wolff hits back after Christian Horner hints Red Bull could move for George Russell
Lando Norris: Chasing down Max Verstappen definitely possible
Stream every F1 race with NOW Sports Month Membership
Nonetheless, the team are aiming to finish the campaign on a high with another big upgrade planned to debut on the W15 at the Circuit of the Americas on October 18-20.
Asked in the team’s Singapore GP debrief video how the team planned to spend the three-week break to Austin, technical director James Allison said:
“We will be trying to figure out how to mitigate what ailed us this weekend, how to figure out how to make the tyres run better on these overheating circuits.
“We’ll be also doing quite a lot of work to bring our last upgrade of the season together.
“We’ve got quite a fairly substantial set of new clothes for the car coming for Austin that we hope will give us a decent weekend there.”
Lewis Hamilton almost had a disastrous moment as he entered the pit lane in his Mercedes
After a difficult race in which the team’s car struggled for performance in gruelling humid conditions, George Russell and Lewis Hamilton missed their usual post-race media engagements on doctor’s advice after suffering from what Wolff said was “borderline heatstroke”.
Allison said while the British pair quickly were quickly able to recover from the excursions of the race after taking on fluids, the frustration about the W15’s lack of pace lingered for longer.
“I think like the rest of us they’re feeling fed up that the car was not particularly competitive in race trim,” conceded Allison.
“It was okay in qualy but not in race trim. We suffered again from a thing that has been problematic for us which is on softer rubber at tracks where tyre temperature is at a premium, where it’s very easy to overheat, we lose relative competitiveness and Singapore is at the extreme end of that experience and it was quite a difficult thing for them to manage.
“And to add insult to injury, 30 degrees air temperature, 70 per cent relative humidity, it was very hot in the car and at the end of the race both of them were feeling that.
“They feel a lot better now from the heat part of it, you know. Cold ice bath and a few drinks and they bounce back relatively swiftly but the more significant thing which is caring about the pace of the car, that hurt lingers a little longer.”
Hamilton’s race had proved particularly frustrating.
The 39-year-old qualified as the team’s lead runner in third but he ultimately finished two places behind Russell in sixth after being the only driver in the grid’s top 13 cars to start on anything other than the medium-compound tyre.
Allison admitted it had simply been a “clear mistake” to chance the softs for the first stint.
“If we could turn back time, we would do what those around us did and select the mediums,” said the Mercedes technical chief.
“The reasoning was that the soft tyre very often allows you to get away from the start abruptly and allows you a good chance of jumping a place or two in the opening laps of the race.
“We had no real expectation before the race that we were going to suffer the sort of difficulties that we then experienced on the soft rubber. So, we imagined we would get the upside of the soft rubber, of getting a place or two.
“We didn’t, because that just isn’t the way the starts played out. And then we hoped that the downside of the soft being a bit more fragile wouldn’t really play out particularly badly because on the whole, if you look back over the years in Singapore, on the whole the pace starts very, very easy at a Singapore race and the drivers then build up the pace over many, many laps, leaving a soft tyre perfectly okay to run relatively deep into the pit window.
“We didn’t get the places at the start, the pace started building up from around about lap five and that left Lewis with a car that was not particularly happy anyway, suffering from quite poor tyre degradation and needing to come in early as a consequence and really ruined his race for him.
“Yeah, so just a clear mistake.”
