Mercedes rivals also battling with tyre windows, says chief strategist

Mercedes' chief strategist James Vowles says the Silver Arrows main rivals are in the same boat when it comes to consistently exploiting Pirelli's 2018 compounds.

The German outfit is enduring the most difficult start to a season since 2013, having failed to win in the first three races of 2018.

While the squad's W09 charger is generally perceived as a very good car, Mercedes is still in search of consistency, with Vowles suggesting tyres and temperatures are the main culprits impacting the team's performance swings.

"I think the tyres this year are having an impact," said the engineers in a special Mercedes video.

"But more so than that there’s a second aspect as well, which is you’ve got three teams – Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull – that all, depending on what tyre it is, and what track it is, are able to have different levels of performance to each other.

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"And what that’s creating is different cars with different levels of performance depending on what the track temperature is, what the conditions are, and what tyre they have fitted to the car.

"What you’re seeing is a shift in environmental factors for a track. As you go to a track and it becomes windy or not windy, or cold or hot, you can see a swing of up to a second in laptimes because of those environmental factors."

Vowles looks back at the three opening events and deciphers Mercedes varied performance.

“In Melbourne we were able to get the car working on the tyres," he said. "In Q3 we set a time that was extremely fast with Lewis.

"If we go forward to Bahrain, the medium tyre worked very well on our car, and the degradation on the supersoft looked good, as well.

"So there are little vignettes of information where we’ve been able to get it to work.

"Again, in the Chinese GP in Q2 we did a [1m]31.9s with Lewis, and that would have put us in contention for fifth place on the grid, on a soft tyre. So you get this evidence of the tyres working.

"And conversely the same for Ferrari. In Melbourne they weren’t quite there. On the supersoft in Bahrain they were just outside the range, and degrading too much, and on the medium, a little bit slower than us.

"So it’s a window that all teams have to try and operate with."

Vowles sees specific conditions working either in favour or against each team depending on the characteristics of their car.

"It looked like Ferrari in the cold conditions, and very warm conditions, were faster than us. And there are several effects going on here," said Vowles.

"The way the tyres work, they are very sensitive to temperature on the front and the rear, and you need all four tyres working roughly on the right temperature at every single corner round the track.

"At some corners, where they’re tight and twisty, you generate a lot of temperature. Other corners like the back end of the straight into Turn 14 [in China], you cool the tyres right down," he added.

"And all teams are working their hardest to try and achieve that, but as you can imagine it’s difficult to get it all coming together at once."

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