- 14 May 13, 08:23#358407Toto Wolff:
“We are trying to analyse everything – how you treat the tyre, how you heat it, how you keep the heat in or get the heat out, how you drive, how you build it up. We are looking at our competitors and what you can see is that some cars are having an easier time with the tyres. Raikkonen looks like he is not managing a lot while everyone else is managing a bit in the high-speed corners like [Barcelona Turns] three and nine. So I don’t think it is an inherent car problem, I think it is something about processes. We did a long run in P3 that was a good long run, and we were setting the car up to what we believe was a set-up for the race. So we were quite surprised by the pace of qualifying. Did the others go much more conservative in terms of race set-up? I don’t think so. It is something else. It requires out-of-the-box thinking. This is a pattern we have seen in the past, that the car that is doing good on the track at the beginning of the season is generally a quick car. We had three pole positions, so that is a quick car, but then the performance seems to deteriorate. Now it is about everybody in the team sticking their heads together and saying let’s analyse what we do from a Saturday to Sunday. Is there anything that we need to be looking at which we didn’t look at right now?”
Lewis Hamilton:
“I don’t know why it has taken us so long to get hold of it, as clearly Ferrari has and Lotus has obviously figured it out. We just need to do it, and I am sure we will at some point. I think we all need to just pull together, which we have been doing all year. But now it is more important than ever, particularly after a race like this. We have to take a step back, look at what happened objectively and try to figure it out. We don’t understand what it is. It is obviously the tyres. It is just something we have had a long discussion about and we have to understand where we went wrong and how we can improve it for the upcoming races. It is something to do with how you prepare the tyres or use the tyres, or something like that. It seemed to work quite well in Bahrain but it didn’t work well here, so it is something we haven’t quite caught on to yet. I think it is what we do before we get in the car”
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Not an inherent car problem? Why would the car suddenly become a midfield runner when the lights go out on a Sunday...after taking pole in dominant fashion on an empty tank of fuel? The focus seems to be on tyre degradation...though its not just degradation which we see, but a significant loss of pace when the car is on a high fuel load. This couples with the car eating up its tyres quicker than the others. Everyone are on the same tyres at the start of the race, but somehow the Mercs are always under extreme pressure from behind right from the start.
Breaking News:Lewis Hamilton has officially overtaken The Fonz in race wins. With 88 races less. Lol(Without a specially built blown diffuser, illegal front wing, preferential treatment)
