For two successive weekends now the previously dominant Mercedes has looked vulnerable, a fact demonstrated by the team going back to an older specification on George Russell’s car for the Singapore Grand Prix weekend.
Russell qualified second for the sprint race while championship leader Kimi Antonelli laboured to seventh place, half a second off his team-mate. But Russell only scraped through to the final qualifying session and was outside the top 10 in the final moments of SQ2, finally stringing together a quick enough lap after the chequered flag, having locked a wheel on his previous attempt at a push lap.
Mercedes added what is understood to be its last big upgrade package of the year in last weekend’s Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia. There, neither Russell nor Antonelli looked like winning after Max Verstappen overtook them, and Mercedes’ woe was compounded by Russell suffering an engine failure late in the race.
It would be easy to assume that the upgrade package is a failure, and to take the reversion to Azerbaijan-winning spec on Russell’s car as evidence of that. But the reality is more subtle: Russell had little to lose, since he is carrying a grid penalty into the main race on Sunday, and running split specs has enabled Mercedes to gain a better understanding of the new package than it did in Malaysia, where it had no like-for-like data.
A picture is emerging that the upgrade offers a potentially higher performance ceiling, but it is trickier to access.
Antonelli went back to older front wing for sprint qualifying
Photo by: Sam Bloxham / LAT Images via Getty Images
“Kimi said that [P7] was everything he had today,” said deputy team principal Bradley Lord.
“The car’s balance is less consistent and less stable with the new package compared with George’s car. And it seems to be more difficult to get through the slow corners.
“You need to apply a little more throttle because of the understeer. And on the entry to the high-speed corners, the car is a bit nervous. And of course, that costs you confidence.
“So I would say the new package simply seems trickier to drive. And unfortunately, that’s reflected in today’s result.”
Between practice and sprint qualifying, Mercedes swapped Antonelli’s front wing to the older twin-plane spec. But it cannot restore the entire car because the upgrade package features a different aerodynamic concept for the sidepods which has required some of the car’s cooling architecture and ancillaries to be relocated.
Not that it would be possible to do this between qualifying and the race anyway, owing to the parc ferme rules. While parc ferme doesn’t apply between the sprint race and qualifying for the main race, this offers a window of just three hours.
“We’re stuck with what we’ve got for this weekend,” confirmed Lord.
“It’s not possible to revert to the previous specification during the race weekend. We can’t swap chassis either.
“No, it’s simply not possible. It would take two days of work to convert the car back to the previous specification.
“So we’ve got what we’ve got for this weekend. Hopefully, we can find a more solid and stable baseline for Kimi.
“We simply have to make the best of it. But this is exactly the experiment we deliberately decided to carry out this weekend.”
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