April 10, (THEWILL) – Toto Wolff is giving his Mercedes team a 20% probability of defending their title heading into race day at the Australian Grand Prix.
The Silver Arrows have had a rough start to this new regulatory age, with them uncomfortably trailing Red Bull and Ferrari both the Bahrain and Saudi Arabian Grands Prix in 2022.
The chance of Mercedes coming back strong in new conditions and on a flat surface as Formula 1 moved on to Australia and returned to Albert Park for the first race since 2020 is slim.
After the qualifying races, the chances have slimmed even further. Lewis Hamilton will start in P5 and George Russell in P6, despite the fact that both drivers were a fraction of a second slower than Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc on the pole.
Mercedes does not appear to be a contender to win the Constructors’ Championship for the tenth year in a row, but Wolff believes they have a 20% chance heading into the race on Sunday.
In remarks after the qualifying races, Wolff said: “I think we are on the back foot, if I look at it from a mathematical standpoint and probability I would say the odds are 20/80. But this is motor racing and in motor racing anything can happen.
“Teams can DNF and if we unlock the potential of the car we are right back in the game. So as a racer I would say it’s probably 40/60 and as a mathematician I would say the odds are worse against us.
“But it’s the third race of the season and we are not going to write the title off, so it’s just the current status quo – we are 0.9s off.”
Russell previously stated that if Mercedes can solve their bouncing problem, they will be able to unleash a significant amount of additional performance.
Despite the fact that Ferrari experienced bouncing during qualifying for the Australian Grand Prix, Leclerc was able to clinch pole.
As a result, Wolff confesses that this is not the only reason Mercedes is lagging behind, despite the fact that Mercedes is suffering the most from it.
“You can see many other teams, like Ferrari, still have some bouncing, but they have done many other things right that we missed out on or didn’t perform very well with”, Wolff stated.
“It was the same for Red Bull, their car got quick from one to another in Bahrain testing by bringing the update.
“Our bouncing is worse [than Ferrari’s] because we carry it into the corners and the high-speed, so you can see where we lose performance. When you look at the overlay in sector one we are very competitive, sector two we are competitive and then in sector three, through Turns 9, 10 and 12 we are losing all our margin — it’s almost like a second through a couple of corners.
“So is curing the bouncing going to miraculously unlock a second within the car? No, for sure not. But there are many other little improvements we can make on weight and other things we can optimise and we just need to chip away the small gains while understanding the car.
“I’m optimistic that eventually we will get there, whether it is two races or five … we need to stay humble and my time horizon is not a race weekend or a year, it is more like ten years and I want to look back and have a competitive team and there will be more difficult years and this is one of them.
“This car is very difficult to correlate because you can only move the car with a certain frequency in the wind tunnel where it is limited and on track it does something completely different, so this is a new way of analysing aero data and correlation between the simulations and the real world, which needs to be understood.
“We believe we have the tools and the people to understand that, but we haven’t found that yet.”
About the Author
Jude Obafemi is a versatile senior Correspondent at THEWILL Newspapers, excelling in sourcing, researching, and delivering sports news stories for both print and digital publications.
