Mercedes dominated the Las Vegas Grand prix weekend. The team secured their 60th 1-2 finish of their history in style under the lights on Saturday night. Team boss Toto Wolff says that it is no coincidence that cold tracks result in his car finding its sweet spot.
Once pole sitter George Russell launched off the line in Las Vegas and maintained the lead by the first corner, a 3rd victory in the pinnacle of motorsport for the British racer never looked in doubt. He controlled his pace, his tyres and drove a perfect race. Team boss Wolff said that cooler conditions bring out the best in his team’s 2024 challenger – the F1 W15 – when asked post-race what contributing factors led to this performance.
“It’s cold.” said Wolff. “I think that clearly you can correlate where we’ve been strong. We’ve been strong in Silverstone, we’ve been strong in Spa, and then here in Las Vegas. And I think it’s just keeping the car in its sweet spot. The tyres in the optimum window clearly shows that the car can be very, very quick. I mean, we were two seconds quicker than our competition at times when George was pushing and for the rest of today, he was just managing his pace.”
Viva Las Vegas
The impact of winning in Las Vegas – and dominating the event – was not lost on the 52-year-old team boss: “Winning here, finishing with a 1 and 2, means that we’re going to be in the minds of the fans and all of the American stakeholders. And it’s good prime time TV in the United States.” One can imagine that the victory will not do Mercedes’ car sales stateside any harm. As much as the day belonged to Russell, fan-favourite Lewis Hamilton delighted his army of followers after coming from P10 to finish 7.3 seconds behind the race winner. Wolff praised his soon to be departing driver in his comments in the paddock after Saturday’s race.
“You can see that the car was great, the strategy worked out for him and his driving was very good. Coming from tenth and then coming so close to George at the end shows how great he is as a driver.”
Graining…what graining
Also great was the way Mercedes were able to manage their tyres. Wolff highlighted this in his recent remarks whilst also expressing shock at such an outcome.
“It’s strange, because we were capable of pushing whenever we wanted to and there was no graining appearing.” Wolff explained. “Neither on the medium nor on the hard. You could see Charles [Leclerc] attempted a few times to put pressure on George, which he defended great, I think. I don’t know what the outcome would have been of that but the driving was exceptional. And he fell off – Leclerc – after a few laps, couldn’t hold the pace, fell off. We didn’t get a single sign of graining nor degradation.”
Obviously, should the Silver Arrows find a way to maintain such a performance season long next year, then they will certainly be in the title hunt. So, why is it that the team had been able to find the sweet spot in Silverstone, Vegas and at Spa – seeing how even if they were all cold conditions they are very different tracks.
“I think it kind of spirals into the bad zone when you break traction and then it’s hot you kind of swing out of the window all the time. And when you break traction here, that was actually helpful to keep the temperature at the time. So clearly, there is a pattern that some teams really love the cold and extract a lot of performance and there are some teams that have been so strong when it was hot in Singapore, in France, for example, and then they have dominated in the way they just controlled it in the way they wanted. So, yeah, it would be important to find a balance for next year.”
Looking ahead to next year, Wolff also explained the effect that could be felt next year from the team’s performance in Las Vegas.
“I think this one is a really important result because you have fluctuations over the weekend and then normally you can see where we’ve been good here and that we’ve been not so good in that session. But here, every single session we were ahead, so lots of good data that allow us to say at least we know where the sweet spot is, this is where we need to be and then try to find out how we can hit that target more often.”
More success to come before the season’s end?
With confidence high, what chance of further success before the end of the season? On this point, the man leading Mercedes explained that the next event Qatar has a circuit layout well suited for his car.
“I think Qatar has lots of high speed, that is something that we generally like. Let’s see what we can learn from here and then kind of transfer over into Qatar.”
