Mercedes Team Principal Toto Wolff has admitted it must “experiment every single race” to overcome the troubles it has encountered with its 2024 Formula 1 car.
The German marque has endured a tumultuous beginning to the campaign, with a double retirement in Australia resigning the team to its worst start since 2012.
Despite winter optimism that its revamped car concept provided a more benign platform, both drivers have been startled by the inconsistent handling of the W15.
Lewis Hamilton went from being within a tenth of the pacesetting time in FP3 at the Albert Park Circuit to then winding up outside the top 10 as he qualified in 11th.
Wolff revealed that Mercedes is bemused with the sudden regression in pace between sessions, revealing how upbeat Hamilton had been at the end of final practice.
“I think you should have heard him after FP3 this morning. He said that the car is the best in three years. He had so much rear downforce and he feels confident,” he told Fox Sports.
“And we didn’t change the car a lot. We had track temperature changed by five degrees, believe it or not. So that’s nothing.
“And the car transformed from something that was the best in three years to something that is undrivable.”
Asked whether he could explain the reasons behind Hamilton’s fluctuating fortunes behind the wheel of Mercedes’ latest car, Wolff replied: “Well we have no idea.”
He then added: “That’s part of the issue. We’re having two and a half thousand people that work on these cars, half on the engine, the other half on the chassis and we are looking at everything and there’s something which our technology is not showing us because this window of performance is so narrow.
“Where the aero works or it doesn’t, lots of wind, the wind picked up in the afternoon, that place are old but we haven’t really been able to pinpoint it.”
Mercedes opted to conduct tests during practice that saw the team revert to an older specification floor and trial aggressive set-ups that “backfired” on Hamilton’s car.
Wolff has conceded that Mercedes’ predicament is now so dire that it has to ponder adopting the desperate measure of running evaluations through entire weekends.
“I think we are coming to a point now that we need to experiment every single race, not only on Friday because our performance seems to get worse throughout the weekend,” he said.
“We’re good on Friday, then we are good in some of the sessions on Saturday, but the more grip we have, the faster it goes, the more we reach the ceiling of the car.
“Our data shows it’s not the ceiling.”
