Mercedes F1 boss Toto Wolff has noted his team’s “positive trajectory” in the last three races, and feels the outfit’s development path now make “much more sense”.
Mercedes appears to be slowly but surely clawing its way back into contention in Formula 1 thanks to the Brackley squad’s recent upgrade push aimed at addressing fundamental issues that plagued its car in the opening races of the season.
For the third year running, Mercedes has faced an uphill battle at the start of its 2024 campaign.
Despite a bold decision to overhaul their car’s concept, the team encountered significant challenges.
The performance of its W15 silver arrow was characterized by its peaky and inconsistent behavior, with the team’s engineers and drivers struggling to find a balance that worked effectively across both high-speed and low-speed corners.
Once again, underwhelming results ensued. But the introduction of a new front wing in Monaco coupled with many other small changes have yielded positive results and gone a long way towards ironing out many of the W15’s problematic traits.
In Montreal, George Russell secured his second career pole in F1 and delivered to Mercedes its best result year-to-date, the Briton seizing the final set on the podium while teammate Lewis Hamilton claimed a season-best fourth place finish.
“I think definitely since Imola we’ve taken the right steps and put parts on the car that were working,” said Wolff, commenting recently on his team’s development path.
“That was something we were struggling with in the past couple of years, and now directionally we seem to be adding performance every weekend, and with new parts coming also in Barcelona that should help us.
“So, I would very much hope that we can continue this positive trajectory.
“I’m always a bit worried when you’ve been carried away that everything seems to now be falling into place, because this is a difficult sport.
“We’ve had this positive trajectory now for the last three races and everything seems to be making much more sense.
“Sometimes when things interact well with each other, the overall flow structure becomes more efficient, you are able to optimise the ride height and bit-by-bit we’ve added more performance.
“So another step in Barcelona and hopefully we will see it on the stopwatch.”
While much of the attention on Mercedes was centered on its car’s new front wing, Wolff highlighted the importance of the many smaller changes implemented under hood of its car.
“Sometimes when you bring a highly visible part like bodywork or a front wing, this is pretty much the talk of what has changed the performance,” he said.
“The truth is we have, over the last few races, brought so many new parts, visible and invisible to the eye, that have contributed milliseconds to more performance.
“I think this is where those marginal gains then have that positive effect and that was just a huge effort of the factory. So I think the wheel has started to get some real motion now.”
In Mercedes’ Spanish Grand Prix preview, the Austrian described the Circuit de Catalunya as an important venue in terms of providing his team with more validation of its improvements.
“Barcelona will provide a good test of our progress,” Wolff said. “It has a mix of fast, medium, and low speed corners, a long straight and plenty of elevation change.
“Tracks that contain this wide speed range have been a weakness of ours so far this year.
“This weekend will therefore provide another opportunity to evaluate our progress through our recent updates, and we hope to build on the positive momentum from Montreal.”
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