After winning eight consecutive constructors’ championships, Mercedes’ streak looks set to end this year after having trouble adapting to the new technical regulations that came into force in 2022.
A recurring problem with porpoising with the Mercedes W13 has seen team drivers Hamilton and Russell struggle to battle at the front against the Red Bulls and Ferraris. Neither of them has finished this term more than third, which has left Mercedes 122 points behind the leader in the team standings at the halfway stage of the season.
But the team has made strides forward in recent weeks, helped by updates to the car in both Spain and Britain, which have eased the rebound problem and squeezed out more performance.
In Austria, Lewis Hamilton managed to move from eighth on the grid to third at the finish, while George Russell recovered from a first lap contact with Sergio Pérez and a five-second penalty to finish fourth.
Although the boss of the silver arrows, Toto Wolff , was “quite satisfied” with the performance of Mercedes in the Austrian GP, he considered that the team still lacks a few key tenths of total performance to be able to fight for victories again .
“When you look at the result, and this sport is about results, third and fourth are fine,” the Mercedes chief executive said after the race in Austria.
“But we are still missing those two or three tenths of performance. In general, the car has been much faster this Sunday.”
“He’s still not fast enough to really challenge the guys at the front.”
Asked if there was any particular factor that cost Mercedes those two or three tenths in Austria, Wolff said it was just “pure performance”.
“I think we’re past postpoising ,” said the star’s team director. “If we went back to Monaco and Baku, we wouldn’t be great, but for sure we wouldn’t have the problems we experienced a few weeks ago.”
Wolff took positive lessons from the fact that Mercedes did so well at the Red Bull Ring, which has historically been one of the most difficult circuits for the team since it returned to the calendar in 2014.
“This one in Austria is never a good track for us,” he said. “In general, in the last eight years, although we have won the titles, this was the only track where we had problems.
In addition, he celebrated that they advanced as the weekend went by: “From that perspective, I am satisfied with how things have gone. In a certain way, in the sprint race we were left in no man’s land”.
“I think on Sunday, maybe we were stuck there again because of track positioning, but the lap times were at least competitive. On Saturday we were losing half a second on every lap,” he concluded.
