In one of the most challenging rounds of the year so far, Mercedes was unable to fight for top positions in the São Paulo Formula 1 Grand Prix – going backwards in both races with Lewis Hamilton and George Russell due to high degradation. Riccardo Musconi, track performance director, spoke about what happened in Interlagos.
To the team’s official YouTube channel, the responsible revealed: ‘The alarms went off during the sprint race. Because after the first two encouraging laps, the degradation of our car was very high, especially coming from the rear axle’.
According to Musconi, despite the improvements made for the Saturday issues, others emerged that prevented a competitive performance: ‘What happened on Sunday was actually a dark picture of our Saturday. We improved the degradation a little on the rear axle, but at the same time we started suffering from understeer. Therefore, the car was struggling to make the turns and as a result, the pace was not there and we couldn’t fight at the front’.
