F1 | Mercedes has confused ideas: is the W15 yet another flop?

What a disaster for the Mercedes. The Anglo/German team believed they had resolved the chronic problems of the last two seasons with the W15, daughter car of James allison and company singer, returned after the team kindly escorted to the door Mike Elliott. And instead, the silver single-seater has a lot of problems, and at the moment it even seems to be the fifth force in the 2024 Formula 1 world championship, less performing even than its customers, i.e. McLaren e Aston Martin. In addition to this, the reliability also does not seem to be at the top given the failure suffered by it Hamilton in yesterday's race, and the damage caused by the accident Russell they are the icing on the cake of a nightmare weekend for the crew of Toto Wolff.

“Very disappointing conclusion to a difficult weekend – said Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes' head of track engineering. Russell's accident caused a lot of damage that needs to be repaired ahead of Japan. We started the race hoping to improve our starting positions: Lewis started on the softs and they helped him gain on the first lap, while George was on the mediums. Hamilton's race ended due to a sudden power unit failure, we had no warning, so we will have to investigate. George knew that he would have to do two long stints on the hard tires and find the right balance between pushing the tire and managing it."

Mercedes understood nothing about the W15

“We knew we couldn't fight with the three teams in front, he was fighting with Alonso for sixth position, after Fernando entered the pits under the Virtual Safety Car and gained ground. George had the opportunity to pass him in the final stint and was caught off guard by the sudden deceleration on the penultimate lap. Difficult weekend, we were not able to compete in any conditions: in the next few days we will analyze the data to see what isn't working and why we are only able to exploit the car's potential in bursts. There is a lot of work to do to give both drivers a better tool during the race weekends."