Last week, FIA introduced the ban on qualifying modes, that will come into life from Belgian GP - what it basically entails is having to ditch the “party modes” that were set to help the teams with pace during qualifying, and only being able to use one engine mode for both qualifying and race. The details of it are supposed to be confirmed by a technical directive before the beginning of Belgian GP weekend. FIA came up with the ban in an attempt to help their technical staff with ensuring compliance with regulations, possibly after the slight scandal of the Racing Point brake ducts situation. But, as said as many, this directive was also supposed to help the rest of the grid catch up with the Mercedes on the front - as Mercedes was traditionally the manufacturer with biggest gains when it came to their qualifying pace. 

As said by Toto Wolff, the boss of Mercedes F1: “I think the primary goal of the FIA was to implement the rule to better understand and better analyse what is going on with the engines. It’s a very complex method between the combustion engine and all the energy recovery system, and having one mode it becomes more easy for the FIA to really see if everything is in compliance.”

When asked about the suggestion that FIA did it to “slow down” his team, Wolff replied: “It has always been the case in F1 that pulling back the leaders, or what supposedly are the leaders, is something that is good for the sport. We see it very much as a challenge. We have a good quali mode and we are able to give it a little bit more power in that last session. But if that is not possible anymore because everything needs to be smoothed out over the race, then it’s not a deficit for us. On the contrary, we think we can translate it into more performance in the race. That is something that is a great challenge for us that will take on once the rule is implemented.”

Wolff suggests that because of the absence of the “quali modes”, there is a lot of potential for a better performance during Sunday, due to the fact that the Saturday mode has a cost in terms of performance for the next day. If those modes are gone, then it is possible to run the power unit harder during the race, without that much risk involved. 

As Wolff said: “I think we don’t lack performance on Saturdays. We had until now quite a margin. We struggled in some of the races where we were quite limited in powerful engine modes, and if F1 were to ban in-season certain power unit modes, then I think it will actually help us in the race. If you can avoid damaging your power unit in those few qualifying laps that you have available, in Q3 and then the odd lap in the race, the damage metrics goes down dramatically. So five laps of quali mode not being done gives us 25 laps of more performance in the race, and that is something we believe will give us more performance.”

He added: “You must take into effect even if it may hurt us more in qualifying, which I’m not sure, and it’s a couple of tenths, then it will hurt all the others in the same way. But for us, we are always very marginal on what we can extract from the power unit, and if we were to be limited in qualifying modes, then well, we will be stronger in the race.” 

The ban will be in place from the upcoming Belgian GP by the end of this month. Will it make the grid more close to each other? Or will it still be potentially a gain for Mercedes?