Mercedes held back thanks to the cost cap: 'Those crashes were costly'
F1 News
Following the Mercedes' problems intoducing their upgrade package at the Circuit of the Americas, the team tried to take a step forward in Mexico City. According to team principal Toto Wolff, there are still a lot of unknowns at this team.
Mercedes arrived to COTA with their latest package following the autumn break, after a promosing start to sprint qualifying, they fell back in the order. After his crash in qualifying that weekend, the British driver could not longer use the aforementioned package. In Mexico, running with the old body parts, he was running ahead of Lewis Hamilton as well.
The seven-time world champion could eventually overtake his teammate, but Russell's car had some damage after fighting Oscar Piastri. "Turbulences might have played a role and one of the main front flaps collapsed. So it was a tremendous loss of performance, I think in the high speed it was 20 points. He then kind of drove around it very well but obviously the more your tires are being hit, the more the impact on lap time is exponential. So how can I explain the difference in pace? I think at the end of the hard run you saw that there was quite a bit of a difference," Wolff began.
"So two reasons. First of all I think George drove very well all weekend. On the other side there may be something in the update package that causes something that we don't understand. We had two massive crashes in the same corner in Austin and we had you know we had a crash in the old car too so these cars are so on the knife's edge that it will be an interesting experiment in Brazil to see whether there is a high speed instability or low speed factor, so I don't think we can just extrapolate that one is better than the other," the Austrian continued about the upgrades.
'Recent crashes make cost cap situation worse'
After George Russell crashed out at COTA, he also finished FP2 in the wall, causing a red flag. Wolff explained why those crashes are hurting his team: "That is a tremendous hit in the cost cap and we probably have to die down on what we put on the car. So we will be having two upgrade packages in Brazil, two floors, but that's basically, there’s nothing else that’s going to come. We have certain limitations on parts where we need to be creative. How are we managing this? And certainly there is an impact on how many development parts we can put on the car, because the answer is zero."
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