Back then the Brackley team was still largely a midfield runner. While Nico Rosberg had won the Chinese GP early in the year, he and team-mate Michael Schumacher scored only two podiums over the rest of the season as the team slumped from fourth to fifth in the constructors’ championship.
It had previously failed to make Q3 with either car at Spa and only just scraped into the top 10 shootout in the previous round at Singapore, so missing the cut at Suzuka with Schumacher 13th and Rosberg 15th was not a total surprise.
However, in the hybrid era such a result was unprecedented. Therefore, 11th place for George Russell and 13th for Lewis Hamilton came as a shock to everyone in the team.
As Hamilton’s radio messages made clear, it was simply a case of the team struggling to get temperature into its tyres on a cold and damp afternoon that was constantly interrupted by red flags.
While everyone faced the same challenge, Mercedes could not get on top of an issue that appears to have been built into the W13.
“We’ve struggled with warm up with this car to be honest,” head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin said after the session.
“And we’ve not got to the bottom of it. Today was a fairly painful example of that, where we couldn’t get the runs in that were long enough to build the temperature to get the tyres in the right window.
“We’ve seen it at all the races. In Bahrain it doesn’t really cost you, and all the other tracks, it’s actually been a bit of a difficulty in qualifying. Race pace has normally been good, I think we’ve demonstrated that we’re third quickest on race pace.
“The problem is on the single lap we seem to be very much in the midfield. And it’s an area that we are working on, but we don’t yet fully understand.”
Both drivers were unable to escape Q2 before red flags following Sainz’s crash and rainfall prevented further improvements
Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images
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