“We’ve had this positive trajectory since the last three races and everything seems to be making much more sense. The stopwatch will tell us.”
In the early stages of the season, Mercedes appeared to be struggling to match the data from their simulations with how the car actually performed on track. Asked whether this side of things had now been addressed, Wolff gave an insight into how the team had set about tackling their problems.
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“There is no such thing as a silver bullet in Formula 1, therefore it was a constant work of understanding what was wrong,” he explained.
“I know that everybody got tired by this answer, but you can’t reverse engineer the performance of the car and say, ‘We’re looking at a Red Bull and this is what we want our car to be.’
“You really need to work your way through the problems. It didn’t seem to correlate between the tunnel and the track, and the car was difficult to drive, we had the bouncing coming back. Then we had a clear indication of what we were missing in the jigsaw, and we put that piece in.”
