Mercedes says all was not lost in Baku despite the team's points shortfall as the weekend revealed a "promising theory" on the reasons behind its car's troubled performance in the last two races.
Mercedes left Azerbaijan with a straight fail on its report, with Lewis Hamilton destroying his chances of reclaiming the lead from Max Verstappen in the Drivers' standings following a rare mistake, and Valtteri Bottas racing anonymously outside of the top ten.
Th Brackley squad had started its weekend in Baku on the back foot, two weeks after underperforming In Monaco.
Both Hamilton and Bottas finished the opening day of running well down the order, but on Saturday, Hamilton managed to extract more performance from Mercedes' W12, qualifying P2 behind Ferrari's Charles Leclerc.
Mercedes technical director Mike Elliott says the work undertaken by the team after Friday's sessions to try and understand its car's woes yielded a theories and one "promising" lead.
"We went into this weekend knowing we were going to have some issues but probably not quite expecting to be where we were come P2 on Friday," Elliot explained in Mercedes post-race debrief on YouTube.
"What we put in place was a series of tests to try and get more understanding. And actually out of that have come a couple of theories, one that is really promising.
"Unfortunately, the test that we did didn't happen until FP3, and it was after we had done the long runs, so while we found good pace for qualifying, we probably didn't get the best setup around that for the race weekend and the actual race itself.
"This is something we need to look at. [It's] something we need to work out how we can build the setup around the changes we've made and then carry that forward into future race weekends where we have similar issues.
"The other thing to bear in mind is both this circuit and Monaco are probably outliers and actually we'd hope not to have some of the issues we've had in the next couple of races. Fingers crossed; we will be in a better position."
Unsurprisingly, Elliot pointed to the W12's front tyres and to temperatures as the main sources of the car's performance.
"I think at this circuit one of the difficulties is getting the warm-up of the front tyre, and it is also a circuit where you need to have real confidence," he said. The walls are really close and if you get it wrong you are going to put it into the wall," he explained.
"Those two things kind of go together because if you can go a little bit quicker, if you can get yourself a little bit closer to the wall because you are confident, then you get a bit more heat into the tyres because you have got more duty.
"If you get more heat into the tyres you get a bit more grip and you can go faster. So you end up with this sort of positive spiral that I mentioned before.
"If I look at the weekend, I think Lewis found a little step in FP3 with setup and that seemed to help him find a little bit more from the car," Elliott added.
"All of a sudden we went from struggling a bit, to being really in the front runners on the pace and Lewis took that all the way through qualifying. The lap he set in Q3 to be second, it wasn't one lap. He was actually quick all through qualifying.
"With Valtteri, I think Valtteri just didn't get to that position. He didn't find that, sort of, last little bit of confidence to be in that positive spiral in the same way."
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