Is Mercedes the diva of awesome cars? Mercedes motorsport boss Toto Wolff certainly thinks so. He described Mercedes as “a bit of a diva to get it into the right window” when it comes to qualifying times. He knows that Mercedes can still be an awesome car yet still have wide variations when it came to its drivers qualifying in the Monaco Grand Prix.
Wolff’s Explanation: Sometimes Even a Great Team Struggles
When it comes to any type of F1 car, let alone the kind that is produced by Mercedes, there is little margin for error. And both the team and the car knows it. Wolff knows the quality he has in his corner. “We have a great team, that has shown in the past their strength in analysing data and finding out how to put it on the track on Friday, and then develop it over the weekend,” Wolff told Motor Sport. “This is one of the outliers that we’ve had in the past. We’ve had it in Singapore for different reasons, but this is another one. It’s the second weekend that comes into my mind after three years or four years where we’ve struggled really badly from the get-go, from FP2, with set-up.”
Like Any Diva, You Have to Treat Your Merc Just Right
One problem? The tires. “It’s very tricky to get the tyres into the window and make the front axle work and at the same time make the rear axle work,” Wolff admitted. “And you can see that, on his lap, the car drops in and drops out, unfortunately mostly out of it.” When it comes to something as powerful as Mercedes’ F1 car the W08, there is little margin for error in getting the tires where they need to be. If the tires aren’t cooperating, the race isn’t going to go well.Well, that’s nothing our Mercedes mechanics have noticed on the local Cincinnati Grand Prix better known as I-71 (we haven’t seen any Formula 1 cars out there lately), but hey, we were just racing traffic. The good news is that tire on all of the street-legal Mercedes can handle a much larger range of temperatures than the F1 tires. So, unless you have a slow leak or a flat, you won’t have to contact your car mechanic for any Mercedes repair on your tires.
