Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 Team find themselves in fifth and seventh places for Sunday’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix after a tense session on the streets of Baku. George Russell out-qualified his team-mate, Lewis Hamilton, whose turn it was to offer the tow on the qualifying laps.
Bouncing has been the primary issue for the Silver Arrows this weekend, causing Russell to be almost 1.4 seconds off the pole time of Scuderia Ferrari‘s Charles Leclerc. The Mercedes team principal believes that his drivers will likely fifth and sixth on Sunday afternoon, unless something happens to the leaders ahead:
“I think the most we expected today was to be third-quickest on the road, but Gasly put in a really strong lap to get between us. There’s no doubt – the gap to the front is big. It’s a long lap time here and we’re lacking pretty much everywhere. I wish I didn’t need to look at these kinds of performance overlays in future with the guys up front,” says Wolff.
“For tomorrow, if you look at it through rose-tinted glasses you can see hopefully the four of them ahead come together in turn 1 and then we can win the race. But I think on pure pace, it’s realistic to finish fifth and sixth.”
The Austrian then followed up, saying that a good strategy is crucial around the Baku City Circuit, and that Mercedes are in a better position to gamble with strategy than the leaders are.
“Strategy can play a big role, you can recover and make up positions if you are on the right strategy. We can gamble given the position we are in because when you’re the hunter it’s a different situation, so we’ll be looking at all options for the race.“
“It’s the corners where we are losing the most [time]” – Andrew Shovlin
Trackside engineering director at Mercedes, Andrew Shovlin, believes that the W13 car is the slowest in the corners, despite the 6.003km circuit featuring large straights that see cars travelling at speeds of around 210mph.
Furthermore, the Briton says that Mercedes were hoping the car would handle better in Baku than it did at the Monaco Grand Prix, which it doesn’t seem to be doing – “We’d hoped that the car would have been easier to work with here than in Monaco but it’s not, and being realistic, the drivers did a very good job to qualify 5th and 7th. We did change quite a lot overnight and were able to improve a few areas of performance – our straight-line speed certainly looked a little better today.”
“However, the gaps to Ferrari and Red Bull are huge and it’s the corners where we are losing the most. We’ve definitely got problems with bouncing on the straights but without that, we’d still be lacking performance, so we clearly need to work on a number of fronts.”
“We’re at least at the right end of the midfield and will hopefully be in a position to pick up any places if either Red Bull or Ferrari have an issue but the long run picture from Friday doesn’t look like we’ll be in the same race as them from a pace point of view. Regardless, it’s generally a crazy and unpredictable race here so we just need to make the most of it and be ready to react if opportunities arise.”
“It’s going to be hot and tough on the tyres so degradation will be important and no doubt play a part but overall, our goal is to secure third best team here and then be ready to seize any opportunity to move higher.”
Sunday’s grand prix is going to be very interesting, considering the new regulations should make overtaking a lot easier in some of the ninety-degree corners throughout the track that have been difficult to find opportunities at in previous years.
