Mercedes: Imola upgrade will set new baseline from where to develop
Toto Wolff is keeping his expectations in check regarding the impact of the upgrades Mercedes will introduce next week at Imola, but the changes should establish a new baseline from where the team can develop its troubled W14.
Miami saw another weekend of performance fluctuations for Mercedes, with George Russell and Lewis Hamilton enjoying a strong opening session on Friday only to fall back into the midfield in qualifying.
Race day delivered a more encouraging result, with Russell and Hamilton crossing the checkered flag P4 and P6 respectively, the pair outpacing all their direct rivals save for Aston Martin's Fernando Alonso.
However, at the end of the day, there were still many more questions than answers among Mercedes' engineers.
©Mercedes
The Emilia Romagna Grand Prix will see the first results of the Brackley squad's efforts to move away from the W14's current zero sidepod concept. But Wolff has warned the team's fans of getting their hopes up in the wake of the changes that will include new bodywork, a new floor and a revised front suspension.
"We need to manage our own expectations, because we're bringing an update package that's going to consist of new suspension parts, and bodywork and some other things," he said in Miami.
"But I have never in my 15 years in F1 seen a silver bullet being introduced, where suddenly you unlock half a second of performance. So, I very much doubt that this is going to happen here.
"But what I'm looking forward to is that we take certain variables off the table, where we believe we could have introduced something that we don't understand in the car.
"[I am hoping] we can go more to a stable platform, and then we should see where the baseline is and what we can do from there."
Wolff said the magnitude of the changes implemented by Mercedes at Imola will be "pretty large" and cover both the aero and mechanical spectrums of the car.
"I think we are chasing downforce and we're trying to do the best possible job in terms of the mechanical platform," the Austrian explained.
"What we're doing is we're introducing a new bodywork, and we're introducing a new floor and we're doing a new front suspension and that's pretty large. That's a pretty large operation. Large surgery.
"It’s going to be a lot of learning in the virtual world, where it is good lap time."
Wolff underscored how next week's package will not only help the team set a new development path, it will also help solve the mysteries behind its car's wayward behaviour.
"That's why the upgrade that we're bringing is going to help us to set the direction, and to understand the various areas that we believe could play a role in why the car is so poisonous to drive," Wolff concluded.
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