Spa Glitches Not Due to Parts, Says Russell

Russell stays calm as Mercedes F1’s Spa troubles not linked to part quality.

George Russell denies that Mercedes F1’s poor Friday at Spa-Francorchamps was due to the poor quality of the upgrade brought to Belgium.

He suggests it was rather due to a lack of understanding of this novelty by the team, but he denies that it is intrinsically bad. Andy Shovlin, the track engineering head, has already promised the return of the said floor (read here).

“No, it’s not because of the floor. We’ve had difficulties here over the past three years and the performance fluctuation of all teams from one circuit to another is quite significant,” Russell recalls.

“I think it was important for us to return to something we are familiar with.”

“It’s part of the evolution over the year and it gives us time to examine all the data from Friday. I am convinced that these improvements have worked as expected.”

He also recalls that Mercedes has always had difficulties at Spa since the start of the current F1 era: “It’s been three consecutive years that we’ve been very fast at Silverstone. Obviously, this season, we were exceptionally fast, and we struggled a bit at Spa.”

“And on paper, you might say we are not exactly the same on the circuit, but there is speed here, and some low speed like at Silverstone. We need to try to understand why. It seems there is something inherent in the cars that works on certain circuits.”

“Red Bull is always fast here, for example. It’s probably their most performant circuit of the season, just like Austria. And for us, Silverstone and Barcelona are circuits where we tend to perform very well. So yes, we need to understand that.”

The characteristics of the cars would therefore be the cause of the performances according to the circuits, but Russell does not know how to clearly correlate them to the results: “I don’t think it’s the ground clearance, because in terms of the range of ride height, at Spa, it’s very similar to what you experience at Silverstone.”

“So I don’t think it’s that. It’s obviously very difficult to position the car correctly, given the importance of bottoming out in the Eau Rouge Raidillon. So that somewhat dictates your ground clearance depending on the Raidillon. So, yes, we need to assess what it is.”

Mercedes Director Toto Wolff hinted that his team had made mistakes in the mechanical settings of the car on Friday with the new floor: “We now know that we made a few mistakes on Friday. We’ve changed that on the car and rebuilt it.”

“And the drivers said it was much better. We think it was more of a mechanical error, but we went back to what we knew how to do and left the issues for later, so as not to compromise our weekend because of a new part.”