Mercedes boss Toto Wolff says his team now understands why its W13 car has been so prone to performance swings depending on the circuit.
Last week in Spa, Mercedes was a country mile behind Red Bull and Ferrari in qualifying while it was also outpaced by Alpine, a performance that followed a competitive display in Hungary just before F1's summer break.
Mercedes has made undeniable progress in its efforts to mitigate the porpoising and bouncing issues that undermined its car's performance in the first part of the season.
But the massive deficit suffered by its drivers in Belgium confounded the team and Wolff in particular who called his outfit's qualifying performance at Spa "unacceptable" and the worst he had experienced in ten years.
However, the Brackley squad's engineers immediately dug in and have since understood that Mercedes' pace on Saturday afternoon at Spa was an "outlier" and track specific.
"Yeah, it is a little bit like that," Wolff told Sky F1 after Friday's practice at Zandvoort where the team faired much better.
"We understand now why that is and you can see it’s all about getting the car in the right balance, be it aerodynamically, also grip wise.
"Spa was an outlier in terms of what our car was like. Here is one of the better circuits and you can see we are right where the music plays, but let’s see what happens tomorrow."
George Russell and Lewis Hamilton topped FP1 on Friday and the latter clocked in just behind the pace-setting Ferraris in FP2. And the seven-time world champion felt buoyed by his performance on the opening day of running at the Dutch Grand Prix.
"This is a lot better than my Sunday last week and better than the Friday too," Hamilton said.
"It's been a decent start to the weekend, we've landed in a much sweeter sport with the car, just being a very different track.
"It's still a work in progress, we aren't that far behind which is great to see and the car doesn't feel too bad so we've got to keep chipping away.
"This track is a lot more aggressive on the tyres and we could feel some bouncing here and there but if we can make some progress overnight, which we normally do, then let's see what's possible tomorrow."
©Mercedes
In terms of improvements, Wolff suggested that most of the Mercedes engineers' focus has been on areas underneath the bodywork of the W13 silver arrows. And for now, that quest for progress remains a "trial and error" process.
"I think it’s more a question of things you don’t see on the car rather than what you see," explained the Austrian.
"It’s obvious we have a narrow sidepod concept and in some other things, the rear floor sticking out more than on the other cars, and certainly that will play a role.
"But much more important is how have we developed the car to run where low on the floor, we can’t run it and what does it do to our suspension kinematic, and this is why at the moment it’s just a little bit of trial and error."
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