Mercedes have no idea what went wrong after disastrous Brazil GP

For Andrew Shovlin, it is a big blow that Mercedes performed so badly in Brazil. Mercedes' Trackside Engineering Director says he is extremely disappointed with the weekend in Sao Paulo.

Prior to the Brazilian Grand Prix, Mercedes were seen as one of the outsiders. In 2022, Mercedes still managed to win the sprint race and the Grand Prix with George Russell. However, the team came home disappointed. A poor sprint race was followed by an even more dramatic Grand Prix on Sunday.

Mercedes completely missed the mark

"We were very limited in what we could change on the car between the sprint and the Grand Prix today. Effectively, it's just the front wing angle and any electronic settings the driver can make from the cockpit. As such, we knew it would be difficult to make much of a step in performance, but we were always going to give it a go," Shovlin noted in the press release. George Russell stated that the team thought the sprint race was a one-off, but that turned out not to be the case.

"The starts were generally good. Unfortunately Lewis got past by Alonso into turn four on the second, but it was clear that we didn't have the pace to race them today. It was very much a case of hanging on from there. The drivers were having to manage tyres and deal with a lack of top speed. Towards the end we retired George as an issue on his cooling system was causing temperatures to slowly go out of control.

"Clearly, we've got something very wrong with the setup. We've had the pace to fight for podiums in the recent races, and today we were barely able to fight for points. We're obviously disappointed and we will work hard to understand and fix what we got wrong this weekend," Shovlin concluded.