Not for the first time, Mercedes don't 'completely understand issue'

Mercedes don't 'completely understand' the issue they faced during the 2024 Japanese Grand Prix. Since the 2022 technical regulations were introduced, Mercedes have been playing catch up and have said numerous times they are yet to get to the bottom of all the problems. Despite already having two seasons with the current generation of F1 cars behind them, the German formation still does not understand everything about their car.

At the Japanese Grand Prix, Mercedes were unable to get close to the podium positions. George Russell finished seventh, and Lewis Hamilton ninth. In Mercedes' race debrief, Andrew Shovlin, trackside director of engineering, explained that the big problem was tyre wear. The tyres lost a lot of speed quite quickly. The team does not understand why they suffered so much. "I wouldn't say we've got a complete understanding of that issue now. That's one of the jobs that we're going to be getting
into in the next few days trying to work out exactly what happened and why did we drop off so much," Shovlin said.

Mercedes still have a lot of work to do

The team's big goal in Japan was to make the car more predictable over the weekend. Toto Wolff's team seem to have succeeded with this. "What we found is that we can get it in a window but if the wind changes [or/and] the track temp changes it quickly falls out of it [the window] and that was leading to poor performance in race and qualifying. There’s no doubt that we’re not where we need to be at the moment. We know that and we know that we’ve got work to do. But certainly working with the car across the weekend was easier, the balance of the car was more consistent, there are issues that we need to get on top of quickly," Shovlin said.

China promises to be an exciting weekend for everyone. Formula 1 hasn't visited China since 2019 and the teams only have 60 minutes of free practice to get up to speed with the track. "Definitely a big challenge, but it's quite fun and there's good motivation to work on it because if you can get it right, the opportunities at a sprint race are always greater because someone else may have got it wrong," Mercedes' engineer said.