Miami buzz can’t hide Mercedes challenges
MIAMI. - While Max Verstappen and Charles Leclerc staged another wheel-towheel battle for the win in their private contest for the world title, Mercedes left a Miami Grand Prix weekend - characterised by the remarkable buzz around this new event - more confused than ever as to why they are struggling for pace this season.
For the first time this year, the world champions had a glimpse of the performance they always believed was in their car. But no sooner had it appeared than it slipped away again, and the team fell back to their usual position.
George Russell, who used the advantage of new tyres after a late-race safety car to win a battle with team-mate Lewis Hamilton for fifth place, ended Friday in Miami sitting on top of the time sheets.
This was no low-fuel special. The Mercedes was genuinely quick. But on Saturday morning it wasn’t.
The team had changed the car overnight, so they put it back to where it had been on Friday. Still the pace it had shown proved elusive. And it remained so in the race.
Afterwards, Russell, Hamilton and team boss Toto Wolff were befuddled.
“We’ve known all along there is a fast racing car there,” said Russell, who fought up impressively from 12th on the grid on an offset strategy. “Friday was a complete outlier and we don’t really understand why.
“Lewis did a better job than me in qualifying but even fuel- and power-corrected, his fastest laps were Friday and every other driver improved by well over a second.
“My race pace was 0.2 seconds off Leclerc on Friday and today back to half to one second off.
“It’s there, but we need to try to unlock it. We still don’t really understand why it’s so unpredictable. Toto is throwing the word ‘diva’ around but that’s a bit of an understatement. “This weekend is when we have shown the most amount of promise but we are a long way off still.”
Mercedes took a car upgrade to Miami - a new, low-drag rear wing that they believe is the optimum way to run the car but which was not available until now.
On Friday, it looked like it might be the magic key that unlocked the potential Mercedes still think is in the car. But the rest of the weekend proved they simply don’t know what is going on with it.
“We’re the same as we were in the first race,” Hamilton said. “Unfortunately we haven’t improved in these five races. But I’m hopeful that at some stage we will. Just got to keep trying and keep working hard.”
After the race, Wolff was asked whether it was fair to say that the team are lost. He ducked the question, not wanting that conclusion to appear in headlines on Monday, or at least not from his mouth.
“We have been straight from the beginning,” he said. “We are flying in the fog a little bit.
“It’s clear that there is potential in the car and she’s fast. But we just don’t understand how to unlock the potential.
“It is a car that is super-difficult to drive and on the edge of dipping in and out of the performance window - more out than in. And dissecting the data with a scalpel is just a painful process because it takes very long and the data sometimes doesn’t show us what the drivers tell us.
“They have their hands full with a car that is not comfortable or nice or predictable to drive but the data doesn’t show these big swings.
“We haven’t had this situation before in any of the years that it didn’t correlate what we see on the screens with what the driver feels and that is making it even more difficult.”