Mercedes suffered an unexpected setback in Malaysia as their upgrade for the W17 failed to deliver.
The runaway leaders in the constructors’ championship produced one of their weakest qualifying performances of the season at Sepang. Andrea Kimi Antonelli was half a second slower than pole-winner Max Verstappen while George Russell was two tenths of a second further behind.Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff said they expected the team’s long-awaited upgrade, one of few major packages they have introduced, would be worth around three tenths of a second.
“You’re expecting three tenths to kick in and it looks like [we’ve gone] three or four or five tenths backwards,” he told Sky. “It’s the first time we miss out on the top three, and by quite a chunk. So it’s odd, but I guess we will find a solution.”
Wolff said the unusually abrasive track surface at Sepang has complicated the team’s efforts to understand their new package.
“It’s very difficult to understand,” he said. “We have been a little bit caught out on Friday with some car behaviour that we didn’t see all year.
“But then you can say it’s very hot and the Tarmac is very different to all the tracks. It looked really good in the morning. We seem to have, at least with Kimi, made a step in understanding. And then qualifying was a little bit back to what we saw before, just no performance.”
He said the team has identified two clear problems with their car performance this weekend. “It looks like we are very draggy because it’s the first time that we’re losing a lot of time on the straights to, especially, Max,” he said.
“Then through the low speed, turn two, we are not able to turn the car. There’s just too much understeer. So overall, things we haven’t seen we haven’t seen all year.”
However he believes there are further problems the team needs to solve. “Something else is going on and we have to understand,” he said. “This is now [about] working through the data and putting our heads together because we still believe that the upgrade works we just need to understand why not here.”
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