Back then the Brackley team was still largely a midfield runner, and while Nico Rosberg had won the Chinese GP early in the year, he and teammate Michael Schumacher scored only two podiums over the rest of the season. Thus, missing Q3 was actually no big deal at the time.
However, in the hybrid era it was unprecedented, and thus 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. And 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.”
So is it largely an aerodynamic or mechanical issue? Shovlin suggested that the answer is not so straightforward.
“I don’t think it’s aerodynamic in a very simple sense, because we race quite well, we race clear at the midfield,” he noted.
“On a single lap, a lot of the midfield teams are better than us. And we wouldn’t say that’s because they’ve got more downforce than us on a single lap. And likewise, I don’t think it’ll be a kinematics thing.
“There’s things you can do with…
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