Last weekend, after the Qualifying session in Australia, MotorLat had access with other selected media to an online session with Toto Wolff. During the meeting Toto talked about the challenges Mercedes is facing with these new cars. The weekend ended on a positive note for the Brackley based team with George Russell securing his first podium with the team and Lewis in 4^th place. 

When he was asked whether the problems affecting the car were a matter of set up changes or needed more analysis, Toto explained, “I think set up directions are very important and we´ve seen that the drivers are much happier with the car today compared to yesterday than yesterday. Night and day are the words that Lewis chose.

The long runs will be interesting tomorrow but there is a gremlin in our car, a few gremlins we haven’t found yet and that is something we need to continue to analyze and look at the data. As I said before it´s science, it´s physics, not mystic.”

As it was the case over the 3 first races, all teams struggled at some point and Toto remains hopeful that Mercedes will understand how to solve the problems. “I believe we´re going to get it nailed down with these cars as well. You can see that many other teams like Ferrari still have some bouncing but they have done many other things right, that we missed out on or that we didn´t perform very well. Same for Red Bull. Their car got quick from one day to the other in Bahrain testing by bringing the update.”

He later added, “These cars are very difficult to correlate you can only move the car with a certain frequency in the wind tunnel where it´s just limited and on track it does something completely different. So, this is a new way to of analyzing, a new way of correlation between the simulations and the real world which needs to be understood. We have the tools and the people to understand that. But we haven´t found that yet.”