The long-awaited upgrade package Mercedes introduced last weekend may have made them less competitive, Andrea Kimi Antonelli has admitted.
Antonelli led the opening stages of yesterday’s race ahead of team mate George Russell. However both were overtaken by Max Verstappen, who went on to win the race.Mercedes originally planned to introduce their new parts for the W17 at this weekend’s race in Singapore. They brought the upgrade forward after Formula 1 added last weekend’s round in Malaysia to replace the cancelled event in Bahrain.
However the unusually abrasive track surface at the Sepang International Circuit complicated the team’s efforts to understand the performance of its upgraded car. Antonelli qualified half a second slower than Verstappen.
He said the performance of the upgrade is “the question we need to answer because we don’t really know if it made us go faster or worse.”
However he pointed out the team has been less competitive at tracks which share some traits with Sepang. “It’s fair to say that this season, whenever we went on really old Tarmac, we’ve struggled. For example, in Zandvoort, McLaren was much quicker than us, especially on the older Tarmac.
“So I think maybe it’s just a fact that the Tarmac is very old and that for the tyres it’s very, very hard, and maybe we just struggle on this kind of Tarmac.
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“But, of course, the track and the Tarmac made our life difficult in understanding whether it made us improve or not.”
The championship leader expects the team will have some answers before this weekend’s race. “I’m sure the team – they have a lot of data, especially after this weekend – and I’m sure for Singapore we will come with a much, much better view on the package and hopefully we can extract the full potential out of it.”