Wrong decision by Mercedes? "It's not a matter of complacency"

With the least number of laps driven in testing and posting far from quick times, Mercedes might have the worst preparation ever for a season. Team boss Toto Wolff is therefore quite worried.

Hair in their soup

"We found a hair in our soup," Wolff said on the official channel of Formula 1. The test days in Bahrain were somewhat unsavourily, with Mercedes struggling with gearbox problems and several spins from Lewis Hamilton.

Reason to worry, then, for Wolff at Mercedes: "I always worry, sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes for the wrong reasons, but pre-season tests are always exciting. You always find things that are not good and we had quite a few struggles in the first few days," he added.

No shakedown

Unlike many other teams, Mercedes did not do a shakedown prior to the test days in Bahrain. Something Valtteri Bottas has already said he would have preferred to do. "The shakedown, if done in the right conditions, gives you a bit more insight, but our problems in the first days were not due to whether or not we did a shakedown," Wolff said defending that choice. "It's not a matter of complacency."

Cracking data

Mercedes have just under two weeks until the first race, so there's plenty of work to do."On the to-do list is to crack the data," Wolff said. "Trying to understand where we performed well and where not, where we had a good correlation with our simulations and the tunnel and where not, and just in general. It's like sleeping on an idea at night. The next day you wake up more intelligent."