Eye-catching Mercedes floor upgrade removal theory rejected by Toto Wolff

In the midst of a season in which Mercedes has nailed the W15’s upgrades, Toto Wolff has rejected a suggestion they got it wrong with the floor at Spa.

Arriving at Spa on a five-race podium streak that included race wins in Austria and Britain, Mercedes brought new parts for the W15, one of which was a new floor.

Mercedes will reinstall the Spa upgrade package at Zandvoort

Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

It, however, looked as if the team’s streak could come to an end with Lewis Hamilton lamenting a “pretty bad day” on the Friday with a “completely different” feeling with the W15 compared to recent successful outings.

The team opted to revert to the Silverstone package, removing the updated floor as part of that, with George Russell going on to lead Hamilton across the line in Sunday’s Grand Prix before he was disqualified for a technical infringement .

Hamilton picked up the victory, his 105th in Formula 1, as Mercedes still recorded their third win in four races.

Wolff was quick to deny the Spa floor was Mercedes’ first development hitch of 2024, adamant he’s confident it was just an anomaly.

“Yeah, I think we are [confident]” the team principal told the media including PlanetF1.com.

“We made a drastic change in order to recover some of the performance but we believe it wasn’t the floor.

“So it’ll be quite interesting when we put everything on the car in Zandvoort and correlate and see what one does to the other one.

“Then we can be sure whether it’s the mechanical bit that we thought we got wrong or whether there’s a few interactions aerodynamically and mechanically that didn’t work here.”

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The team’s trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin confirmed Mercedes will reinstall the Spa upgrade package at the next race in Zandvoort.

“The reason we reverted the car to the Silverstone spec on Friday night was because we had a good race in Silverstone,” he said in Mercedes’ post-race debrief.

“Spa and Silverstone are not dramatically different circuits in terms of the corner speed range that you are dealing with. We had clearly introduced some problems somewhere.

“We think that was largely due to how we were running the car in Spa, not induced by the updates themselves. That was giving us a bit of bouncing in the high-speed corners, as well as a few issues with the balance. Going to that Silverstone car got it all back to normal.

“We have since had time to look at the data to understand what it was that we did, and we are pretty confident that we will be going for a reintroduction in Zandvoort.”

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