MERCEDES TEAM PRINCIPAL
Not great results, but do you have new confidence in the W15?
When you look at the results, it’s clearly not good. And everybody knows that. But we’ve definitely made a big step forward in how we want to run the car, and in our understanding. This was one of the worst tracks for us last year and we were pretty close to the frontrunners – not Max, but the guys behind – in qualifying, and that came as a surprise. We were very quick through the Esses; last year we were nowhere.
What happened with the strategy?
When you look at how it unfolded, we were trying to make a one-stop stick. We probably over-managed the tyres and had an atrocious first stint, but a very competitive second and third stint the moment we basically did what the others did. It would have looked completely different.
Is there a correlation between higher temperatures and performance drop?
The track temperature was three degrees different between stint one and stint two. So as much as I believe there is a relationship between our performance and the track temperature, I don’t think it was the reason for our off performance in the first stint. That was trying to extend it to one stop, losing lots of time with the overtakes, more than the track temperature.
What have you learned about the car?
Where we put the car in terms of aero and mechanical balance is so complex for us. These two need to correlate. We got to the point of saying, ‘OK, we’ve got to do something different here’. We’re measuring downforce with our sensors and pressure taps, and it’s saying we have 70 points more downforce in a particular corner in Melbourne than we had last year. But it’s not a kilometre per hour faster, so it doesn’t make any sense. We wanted to tick a few boxes to understand: is there any limitation we have spotted? And I think there is.