Mercedes eyes redemption in Miami after China set-up misstep

Mercedes is eager to bounce back from a strategic misstep in China as the team heads to Miami for F1’s second Sprint race weekend of 2024.

The team's struggles in Shanghai resulted from changes made under the sport’s revised parc ferme regulations, which now allow adjustments to be made to a car’s set-up between Saturday’s Sprint and the Grand Prix’s qualifying session.

Previously, setups were locked in after the first practice session, forcing teams to optimize for both qualifying and the race with a single configuration.

This year's rule change presented an opportunity, but it backfired for Mercedes in Shanghai. After a strong second-place finish in the Sprint event, Lewis Hamilton saw his car plummet to a disappointing 18th in qualifying for the main race, which set him up for a challenging race day.

Reflecting on his team’s China debacle, Mercedes technical director James Allison acknowledged the valuable lesson learned: prioritize performance and set-up experimentation in the Sprint event rather than in the main race when making setup tweaks under the new regulations.

• Read also: Mercedes shoulder blame for Hamilton shock Q1 exit in Shanghai

“Every weekend you go to, you learn things,” Allison said last week’s the team’s Chinese Grand Prix debrief on YouTube.

“It’s one of the truisms of F1, it is a learning race and although you have a factory full of tools, you have a load of computational power, a load of people who are thinking about it, there is no place to learn about the car better than with the car at the track doing what it’s designed to do.

“We head from China – one of the most famously front-limited circuits – to Miami, a track that is more in the rear limited end of the spectrum and our challenge will be to make sure we don’t try and replay China at a Miami that is a very, very different beast and wants different things from the car than China will.”

Acknowledging Mercedes’ strategic error in China, Allison emphasized that for future races, and starting next weekend in Miami, the team will prioritize the Sprint setup and adjust for a more conservative approach in the main race.

“We face the enjoyment of another sprint weekend with this second go of having two bites of the cherry and we definitely learnt during this weekend that if you’re going to be ambitious, be ambitious in the sprint race and then tune it down for the main race rather than the opposite way around,” the British engineer explained.

“Hopefully we’ll land a car in a better place, that the upgrades that we’re going to bring to Miami serve us well in a grid that in qualifying at least is really close, around the part of the battle we’re fighting a few hundredths can make a difference sometimes and a couple of tenths would make all the difference in the world.

“So looking forward to seeing how that all plays out.”

Mercedes actively continues to work on improving its W15 silver arrow, and Miami will see the implementation of updates that will hopefully help rectify its car’s issues.

“That’s of course the challenge that we face in the coming races is to try and move both the setup of the car and also the pieces that we bring to the car so that that’s improved,” he said.

“We’ve got upgrade packages coming to the car but also components that we hope will rectify the underlying balance that is causing us difficulty.

“Much as it’s painful to talk in this way after a weekend like this, I just have to remember that there’ll be races in the future when we’ve executed those things, when we’re back more on the front foot and when we’re progressing where the pleasure of talking about it will be massive and that day can’t come soon enough.”

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