SHANGHAI, China — After being comprehensively outqualified by Ferrari at the Chinese Grand Prix on Saturday, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff is confident his team will be closer in the race.
Both Mercedes drivers struggled in cool and windy conditions during qualifying, finishing the session in third and fourth — over half a second off Sebastian Vettel’s pole position time. Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas had looked much more competitive in warmer conditions during Friday practice and Wolff is confident the setup the cars will come good on Sunday after he team was caught out by cooler conditions on Saturday.
« Yes, tomorrow will be the proof of concept, » he said. « If not, we have to understand. But I think that the forecast is for quite some different temperatures, some 20º C hotter track temperature. It’s a long race and that could make quite a difference. We have looked at tomorrow, but we have to see whether that proves to be right. »
Wolff said the issue in qualifying boiled down to a failure to get the ultra-soft tyres up to temperature for a single flying lap.
« A car doesn’t lose or gains speed from one race to another, from one day to another. The fundamental base from the car is good, we lost because it’s about getting the tyre in the right temperature window — the never ending story. And what we’ve suffered in the past, from overheating, has happened the other way around today.
« We were always too much on the cooler side and that has triggered a lack of grip and today you can see Ferrari has the tyre in the right window and it seems their car is like on rails, similar to what we had in Melbourne. »
And Wolff shrugged off suggestions the result marked the end of Mercedes’ era at the top of the sport.
« No, if we would swing like this and say this is the end of the era, it would be not the right mindset. We’ve shown in the past that we have recovered from difficult periods. Actually, I started to appreciate the difficult days so much more because they make us progress and understand our car better and the team has gone from strength to strength by learning from these days.
« If you have a really good day, you wouldn’t say, ‘Why the f— did we win the race?’ But ‘Why the fuck did we lose the race,’ we’ve asked ourselves many times. That is something more politely said, when it stings it sticks. So we started to really embrace those days and try to learn. »
http://www.espn.com/f1/story/_/id/23166211/toto-wolff-cooler-temperatures-caught-mercedes-out
