Motorsport boss Toto Wolff believes Mercedes suffered from a “double-whammy” of weaknesses compared to Ferrari which led to the result at the Belgian Grand Prix.
After rain had again interfered late in qualifying to allow Lewis Hamilton to take pole, in the dry on Sunday though, there was no place to hide as Sebastian Vettel breezed past Lewis Hamilton on Lap 1 before going on to claim an easy win.
For the Austrian, that was confirmation of a fear that had already been hinted at in recent races.
“They [Ferrari] have a power advantage,” said Wolff. “We have seen that yesterday in qualifying, that power advantage is at various parts of the straights. You can see even if the exits are worse than ours, the engine keeps pulling.
“We can see they have a slight power advantage and then you add that to our weaknesses out of Turn 1 [La Source] especially, and that causes the double-whammy.
“If you’re not very good on traction and you’re being outperformed slightly on power, that Lap 1 happens.”
Hamilton agreed with his boss that Spa was simply the first example of the current state of play without external factors to influence it.
“I would say those last two races in particular, with the cards that we were dealt we did a better job even though they had better cards,” said the Briton.
“But there is only a certain amount of times you can do that. If you are playing with a deck of cards and you are bluffing there is only a certain amount of times that you can do that before your opponent realises.”
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Both Mercedes and Ferrari brought their third and final significant engine upgrade to Belgium, with another one incurring penalties, but Wolff does think the current unit can be tweaked to close the gap.
“It is all about understanding your power unit and calibrating, extracting all of the performance out of the software, the fuels, the oils and optimising the whole way you run the engine,” he explained.
“That is something which doesn’t involve the hardware and this is an ongoing process. So the answer is yes you can find performance.
“There is no silver bullet,” he admits. “We won’t find any performance that is suddenly going to add three tenths to the car, or to the engine, and we disappear into the sunset.”
