Mercedes mulled pitlane start in Brazil to adjust W14 set-up

Toto Wolff has revealed that Mercedes considered taking its cars out of parc fermé in Brazil and enduring a pitlane start in a desperate bid to change the set-up on its W14 and improve its performance.

Mercedes concluded its Sao Paulo Grand Prix weekend with only one car in the top-ten, with Lewis Hamilton classified eighth while George Russell was forced to retire from the race due to an engine issue.

The team’s mediocre performance on Sunday followed an equally unimpressive achievement in Saturday’s Sprint event that Russell and Hamilton finished respectively P4 and P7, and painfully drove home the depressing pace and tyre degradation problems that impacted its cars and undermined its Brazilian weekend.

The dismal display, which Wolff qualified as “inexcusable” and his team's "worst weekend in 13 year", was all the more difficult to understand after the team’s solid outings in Austin and in Mexico City where the W14’s new floor that was introduced at the US GP proved entirely satisfactory.

And it was precisely this recently updated element that Hamilton singled out as the main culprit of Mercedes’ underperformance at Interlagos.

• Read also: Hamilton blames floor for Mercedes misery in Sao Paulo

“My guess is that the floor is not working and the floor’s not settling down so that just pushed us to go to a higher wing [angle at the rear],” he said.

“I feel we’re just massively draggy on the straights and we’re losing so much time on the straights, there’s nothing I can do about it.

“Then we’re just sliding through the corners. So we have to look into why that is the case on this rough circuit.”

“I am sure there is something within the set-up that we might have been able to have done a bit better. But whether or not that meant we were further up, I can’t say.”

Following Hamilton’s exclusion from second in Austin for an excessively worn floor plank on his Mercedes, the Brackley squad took a cautious approach to its car’s set-up in Brazil, raising the W14’s ride-height by a margin that would safeguard its compliance.

Wolff acknowledged that Mercedes had likely run its car too high last weekend, but the Austrian doubted that its conservative approach was the root cause of its dismal performance.

“We ran the car way too high and it’s something that you know that you carry that on [from first practice],” he said. “But that wasn’t the main reason for an absolute off weekend in terms of performance.

“There’s something fundamentally wrong mechanically. Or, rather, it’s not a rear wing and it’s not the car being slightly, slightly too high – because we’re talking a millimetre, two, that is performance but it’s not the explanation for a total off [weekend].”

Wolff was baffled by the disparity in the performance of its cars between Mexico and Brazil.

“From a really quick car, best balanced or really well-balanced, our drivers happy, to a nightmare. How’s that even possible?” he questioned. “What is it that’s not right?

“I wouldn’t be surprised that we analyse the cars in the next few days and we find out that there was a mechanical issue in the way we set them up although I don’t know what that could have been.”

Wolff confessed that Mercedes’ quandary in Brazil regarding its car’s pace led it at one point to consider a pitlane start for Sunday’s event, which would have allowed its engineers to overhaul its car’s settings.

“We didn’t know fundamentally where we would have changed it because there is a much bigger issue,” he said.

“We thought about that but when thinking about maximising points, it was probably right to start like this.”

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