Mercedes technical director James Allison says he never imagined in his wildest dreams that the Brackley squad would endure such a torrid weekend in Brazil.
Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff qualified his outfit’s performance at Interlagos as “inexcusable” and offered his excuses to Lewis Hamilton and George Russell for providing the pair with such a “miserable” car.
In Sao Paulo, the W14’s lack of straight-line speed coupled with excessive tyre degradation consigned its drivers to the upper tier of the midfield but nowhere near the podium.
Hamilton finished the race a lowly P8 while Russell’s car was retired on lap 57 of 71 to spare its overheating power unit.
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The atmosphere in the former championship winning outfit at the end of the day was permeated with despondency, but Allison admitted to being downright shocked.
“I just wrote an email back to the factory saying that I feel knocked for six by it,” Allison said on the F1 Nation podcast last weekend.
“We came here, it would’ve been too much to expect a repeat of last year’s win - the stars would’ve had to have aligned for that. But I felt like we’d be troubling the podium.
James Allison
“You could say ‘you’ve been undone by your own hubris’. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that we’d have the torrid weekend that we just had.
“In some ways, there’s a comfort in that because we must’ve just got something wrong. We’ll go away and uncover what that was. We’ll come back and hopefully put it to bed.”
Allison offered his insight into the main culprit of Mercedes’ under-performance: tyre wear.
“The main issues were hot rear tyres - which give you a snappier end, and the sort of tyre degradation that we saw,” he added. “And also an annoying amount of understeer.
“When you’ve got a balance that’s all at sea, like that, it’s very easy to nibble away with every bit of throttle, every turn of the wheel, a bit of the tyres.”
In the past, even recently, tyre degradation was seldom a concern for Mercedes. Its sudden emergence has been a big surprise for the team.
And last weekend’s Sprint race format, which warded teams with just a single practice session on Friday, only compounded Mercedes’ problem.
“The tyres were tender for everyone here,” Allison commented. “A single-lap pace which was okay very quickly became mediocre when we gobbled up our tyres.
“That’s normally a strength of ours so it’s particularly upsetting to weather that storm.
“Every weekend, the job is to land the car in a place where it can be as happy as can be. Sprint weekends put pressure on that, because you get one go at that.
“We clearly haven’t landed it where it can do it’s best work.
“That’s not an excuse. It’s a sprint weekend for everyone. That one hour is what everyone has. We generally get that right, but not here.”
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