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Mercedes chief Toto Wolff says that Mercedes must work towards ridding the 2018 Mercedes car of its vicious character. Throughout the 2017 season, Wolff described the Mercedes W08 as a diva as it tended to underperform at certain tracks.
Mercedes once again wrapped up the constructor's title for the fourth consecutive year, while Lewis Hamilton took another world title. Wolff says that it is important that next year's car is a diva, but it must not contain some qualities.
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"You have to be careful in interpreting the pace,” Wolff said. "This has been the start of the 2018 season, I’m not sure we’ve seen everything on the cars that will be on the cars next year. So far, I just don’t feel like we should be patting ourselves on the shoulder on how great we were in the last race.
"I’d rather stay sceptical, leaving no stone unturned and optimising the deficits of the car. But at the end of the day it was the quickest car, it was a diva. We’d like to keep the diva but get rid of her vicious character."
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C. Sainz jr
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Replies (3)
Login to replycalle.itw
Posts: 8,527
Next year's Mercedes will surely not be as hard to drive. They will likely be able to fix things like their excess weight and long wheelbase.
Danimal5981
Posts: 682
I think shortening the wheelbase will have little effect. There's clearly some mid-range missing in the Mercedes power unit. It's no coincidence that ALL Mercedes-driven teams perform less when tracks get twisty and turny. Shortening the wheelbase might in fact make you loose the one thing they truly dominate in, which is the pure pace. I think (and hope) Ferrari and Red Bull are being handed a gift by this change of course by Mercedes.
f1ski
Posts: 726
This is hanging crepe. The MB power unit probably has closer to a 100 HP advantage over the ferrari in quail/pass mode. With the oil burn advantage gone it is probably less than that. Th long wheelbase was more than likely a solution that allowed to put the power down more effectively at high speed tracks that didn't work on lower speed tracks. Ferraris problems started after Spa where they started pulling off way more downforce to maintain speed. This is why when it rained they qualified so poorly. They did not want to say the oil burn hurt them that much because that leads to the suggestion that was cheating.