"If you look at the long runs on Friday, we are in a bit of no man's land," concedes Toto Wolff as Mercedes eye damage limitation from row three; Team boss laughs off tyre pressure conspiracies
Tuesday 22 September 2015 09:15, UK
World champions Mercedes "can't expect any miracles" in their attempts to recover from their shock qualifying defeat to Ferrari and Red Bull and win Sunday's Singapore GP, according to team boss Toto Wolff.
For the first time since June 2014, and just the second time since F1's current-generation turbo engines were introduced last year, Mercedes were beaten to pole position on Saturday as Sebastian Vettel set the pace for Ferrari. Not only that but Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg only qualified on the third row, a massive and entirely unexpected 1.4 seconds adrift of pole.
Mercedes were at a loss to explain why they were struggling so much to get the tyres into the correct working range having tried and failed to find a set-up on the W06 to unlock the car's season-long pace during practice.
But with their long-run pace on Friday having also trailed their two rivals, Wolff admitted on Saturday night: "You can't expect any miracles. Staying realistic is very important.
"If you look at the long runs on Friday, we are in a bit of no man's land because Red Bull was the quickest followed by Ferrari and ourselves, then there is a bit of a gap to Williams. So personally I don't expect us to perform much better unless we have some incidents or some very good driving from Lewis and Nico.
"You never know, but Singapore is a track where it's difficult to overtake, you have to look after the brakes and the pace is the pace. Our pace [in qualifying] was fifth and sixth and it was no different in the long runs."
Although Mercedes' weekend appeared to get off to its normal strong start when Nico Rosberg topped Practice One, Wolff said the W06 hadnt been happy on its tyres from the get-go.
"What went wrong the whole weekend?" he asked. "From the moment we put the ground on the car in P1 we seemed to struggle. There are a lot of factors which have an influence and we haven't really defined yet what the main contributor to that loss of performance is."
Denying that their sudden fall from grace had anything to do with Pirelli's revised tyre recommendations - "we were well within the limits so that wasn't the point," Wolff insisted - the Mercedes team boss added: "I think it's the mechanical grip we were able to extract from the tyres. The car hasn't changed, it's still a very good car aerodynamically, the engine hasn't changed.
"So there is no explanation in the drop-off of the performance of the car, we just haven't been able to put the car in the sweet spot of the tyre. To do that you need to have all the metrics right: ride-height, camber, toe, pressures, the temperature of the bulk, the temperature of the surface. There is so much influence on that."
Hamilton won last year's Marina Bay race by over 10 seconds, but Mercedes had to survive a strong challenge from Red Bull and Ferrari to lock out the front-row in qualifying. Wolff admits the street track seems to cause them certain problems.
"It would be very easy to seek specific explanations why we are not looking good. Clearly what we have seen is a very impressive performance from Ferrari. They have done a bloody awesome job on that one lap with Sebastian, and also Red Bull have bounced back," he said.
"We have seen also last year that it was the track where we probably had the least margin compared to all the other teams. It is a very special and different track and is a more difficult track for us than others."
