Toto Wolff finds potential W15 culprits for sharp decline in Mercedes pace

Toto Wolff believes two factors contributed to Mercedes’ poor performance at the Dutch Grand Prix, with the team left with a shortage of data to inform setup decisions at Zandvoort.

Having won three of the four races leading into the F1 2024 summer break, Mercedes had been hoping to build on their recent form as the season resumed in the Netherlands.

Toto Wolff convinced a ‘biggie’ took Mercedes W15 off course at Dutch GP

Additional reporting by Sam Cooper

However, the team endured their most challenging weekend for some months at Zandvoort with George Russell and Lewis Hamilton qualifying fourth and 11th respectively.

Russell was unable to keep up with the frontrunners on race day and slipped back to seventh, one place ahead of team-mate Hamilton.

Mercedes’ limp performance came after the team reintroduced their Belgian Grand Prix upgrade, which had been removed after Friday practice at Spa last month after providing inconclusive results, two days before Hamilton claimed victory with the previous-spec W15.

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Speaking to media including PlanetF1.com after the race, Wolff acknowledged that Mercedes’ decision to compare the different specifications on Friday at Zandvoort had left the team with a lack of meaningful data.

And that was exacerbated by the interrupted practice sessions on Friday and Saturday mornings, with Logan Sargeant’s crash in wet conditions wiping out much of FP3.

He said: “I think it was two factors.

“We back-to-backed the update kit on Friday, which in the end left us with not a lot of data – the update kit that we put onto the car at Spa on Friday and then took off again.

“And then obviously with the lack of running, like everybody else, maybe it didn’t decide the right things for the car, so there could be a few factors in play that contributed to this non-performance.”

Wolff went on to confirm that the W15 that did not resemble the car that brought so much success to Mercedes prior to the summer break, sharing his suspicion that a “major factor” was behind the team’s underperformance at Zandvoort.

And he stressed the need for the team to “sort it out” in time for this weekend’s Italian Grand Prix at Monza.

He explained: “I think these cars are sometimes a surprise box.

“We’ve had six [races with] podiums in a row and that doesn’t look like the car three weeks ago that was first and second [at Spa], at least first on merit [after Russell was disqualified for being underweight].

“You can’t really end up with a result like this without any major factor playing, and that’s something we need to analyse in the next few days until Monza.

“Was it because we put something on the car that didn’t help? Did we engineer something into the car that wasn’t good?

“Then how do you justify these swings of performance? Sometimes we looked really good this weekend and then obviously today, in terms of degradation, that was not very impressive.

“I don’t want to jump to conclusions too quickly because we’re going to look at it the coming days and hopefully trying to find clues in the data.

“Was it a setup? Was it the track? What is it that we got wrong? Was it the floor that we put on the car? Was it all of this together?

“Hopefully we can sort it out for Monza and become competitive again, but the swing in performance from P1-P2 [on the road at Spa] to P7-P8 [at Zandvoort suggests] there’s a biggie in there.

“It’s not something that was simply a setup decision in my opinion.”

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