17/05/2022
NEWS STORY
Looking ahead to this weekend's Spanish Grand Prix, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff uses a basketball analogy as his team seeks to repeat the potential shown in Friday practice in Miami.
Despite the promise shown on the opening day however, the team took a major step backward over the remainder of the weekend, the porpoising which has plagued the W13 since the start of the season worse than ever.
As he looks ahead to this weekend's race at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, Toto Wolff hopes to build on the promise shown at the start of the Miami weekend.
"With the third quickest car underneath us, we extracted the maximum points possible in Miami," he says of a race which saw George Russell finish 5th and teammate Lewis Hamilton 6th. "Considering George's start position, it was a great recovery drive, helped when the Safety Car was deployed.
"But the timing was unfortunate for Lewis who was strong all weekend and on course to score P5 without the neutralisation of the race. I've no doubt that over the course of the season a little luck will eventually go his way.
"During Friday practice, the car showed flashes of its true potential," he continues. "We continued experimenting with set-up, fitted some new components and that's provided us answers and indications of which direction to go in.
"A huge amount of hard work has been going on in the factories to unpick the data from Miami and turn it into improvements for Barcelona. Having run there in winter testing, albeit with a car that has evolved a lot since then, it will be a good place to correlate the information we have on the current car and we're hopeful that we'll make another step forward.
"The track itself is a good all-rounder, so it really puts every aspect of the car to the test. It's never been a great track for overtaking so it'll be interesting to see how these new-shape 2022 F1 cars impact the on-track spectacle.
"In basketball terms, we head to Barcelona at the end of the first quarter of the game," he concludes. "We know that once we translate the learnings we've made into track performance, there's still a lot of the game left to play..."