Sao Paulo Sprint triggered ‘alarm bells’ for Mercedes

Mercedes says that its performance in Saturday’s sprint event in Sao Paulo triggered “alarm bells” for the Brackley squad and a dire forecast for Sunday’s race.

Mercedes arrived in Brazil with decent expectations after its succession of strong displays in Austin – where the team introduced a floor upgrade on its W14 car – and Mexico City.

On both occasions, Lewis Hamilton finished second behind Red Bull’s max Verstappen, although the seven-time world champion was eventually excluded from the US Grand Prix’s final classification due to non-compliant floor plank.

George Russell’s third fastest time in Friday’s single practice session at Interlagos and the team’s performance later in the day in qualifying, when Russell and Lewis Hamilton rounded off the top six, still offered Mercedes reasonably good prospects for race day.

"The long run pace we showed in free practice was quite reassuring,” explained Head of trackside performance Riccardo Musconi in Mercedes post-race debrief on YouTube.

"We didn't think that we needed to change the car around, so we went into qualifying, and the results were around the third row. In a way, we were not pleased with it, and we felt the car deserved more."

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Unfortunately, the team’s outlook took a hit when it realized the extent of its deficit and tyre wear in Saturday’s sprint.

"The alarm bells went out during the sprint race because after the encouraging first two laps, the degradation of our car was quite high, mainly coming from the rear axle.

"At that stage we worried about our performance on the Sunday.

"We organised for a simulator session back at the factory, looking at the parameters we could change between Saturday and Sunday."

F1’s restrictive Parc Fermé rules on sprint weekends left Mercedes with very few options in terms of tweaking its car’s set-up for Sunday’s Grand Prix.

And pulling its cars out of Parc Fermé to implement changes and therefore endure a pitlane start on Sunday was an option that was a strategic choice that was “off the table”.

In hindsight, Saturday’s sprint had been a dreary picture of things to come.

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

"We were hoping that addressing some of the issues we experienced on Saturday, like pushing very hard on the first couple of laps, doing a bit more management and trimming a bit the balance of the car with the flap, would have been enough to put us in a more comfortable position for Sunday," added Musconi.

"What came out of Sunday was quite a bleak picture resemblant of our Saturday.

"We improved the degradation a bit on the rear axle but at the same time we started suffering from understeer, so the car was struggling to turn the corners.

“The pace therefore wasn't there and we couldn't compete at the front."

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