Mercedes' Zandvoort Flop: Wolff Eyes Floor Test

Wolff scrutinizes the new floor tests after a disappointing race at Zandvoort.

After securing a one-two finish in Belgium before the break, only to see George Russell disqualified, Mercedes F1 managed only seventh and eighth at Zandvoort. Indeed, the track is very different from Spa’s layout, but team principal Toto Wolff is pondering the W15’s performance fluctuations.

“The car can sometimes be a surprise package,” Wolff stated. “We had six consecutive podiums, and this doesn’t resemble the car that was first and second three weeks ago.”

“At least, first on merit. Such a result doesn’t come without significant factors coming into play. It’s something we need to analyze in the coming days at Monza.”

“Is it because we put something on the car that didn’t help? Did we design something in the car that was wrong? How to justify these performance variations, which were sometimes very good this weekend, and then today, there was tons of degradation. It’s not very impressive.”

Is the lack of running proving costly?

Mercedes retested the floor that had not been satisfactory in Belgium, but the trials were too complicated to extract meaningful data: “I think there were two factors. The updates we installed on the car at Spa on Friday, and then removed again, did not leave us with much data.”

“And then, obviously, with the lack of running, like everyone else, we might not have made the right decisions for the car. So there could be several factors at play that contributed to this performance.”

Wolff did not rule out that the floor might be the reason behind Mercedes’ unexpected setback, as he doesn’t think that suboptimal settings could have caused such a delay in performance.

“I don’t want to draw premature conclusions, as we will be looking into this over the next few days and, hopefully, try to find clues in the data. As I’ve said before, is it the setup, is it the track, what did we get wrong?”

“Is it the floor we installed on the car? Is it all of these things together? I hope we can sort it out by Monza and become competitive. But the performance gap between P1, P2, and P7, P8, that’s a big chunk. In my opinion, it’s not just a simple decision of adjustment.”