The Mercedes email sent by James Allison after Brazil GP horror show

Caught out by the pace of the W14, or best to say lack thereof, James Allison says Mercedes were “knocked for six” by their woeful performance at the Brazilian Grand Prix.

Mercedes arrived at the Interlagos circuit as the reigning Brazilian Grand Prix champions having clinched the 1-2 last season. It gave the team hope that maybe they’d be in the running to usurp Max Verstappen but it was not to be.

Slow on the straight, slow through the corners, suffering understeer and destroying the tyres, after two solid races the W14 reverted to the “nasty piece of work” that Toto Wolff had called it earlier in the season.

Allison: Mercedes must have just got something wrong

Worse yet, the team has no idea why things went so horribly wrong.

The team scored just three points in the Grand Prix as Lewis Hamilton crossed the line in eighth place having run as high as P3 in the early laps,  while George Russell recorded a DNF because of cooling issues.

Allison, the team’s technical director, told the F1 Nation podcast. “I just wrote an email back to the factory saying I feel knocked for six by it because we came here, it would have been too much to imagine a repeat of last year because the stars would have to align for that, but I thought we’d be troubling the podium.

“Now you could say well, ‘you’ve been undone by your own hubris’ but never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that we would have the torrid weekend we just had.

“In some ways, there’s a comfort in that because we must have just got something wrong and we’ll go off and uncover what that was. And with a bit of luck, under the lovely thing that racing gives you, a couple of weeks’ time we’ll come back and and hopefully put it to bed.”

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Tyre degradation, from strength to the ‘main issue’

That the W14 “gobbled” its tyres up, as Allison put it, is a concern for Mercedes as that’s usually one of the car’s strengths.

In Brazil, though, hot tyres and understeer meant the tyre degradation was severe.

“The main issue was hot rear tyres, which would give you a snappier end, and would give you the sort of tyre degradation we saw,” he said, “but also an annoying amount of understeer.

“Now when you’ve got a balance that’s all at sea like that it’s very easy to nibble away – with every bit of throttle you put down, every turn of the wheel – a bit of the tyres.

“And we’ve got it in a place where a single lap face that was okay, very quickly became more than mediocre as we gobbled our tyres up.

“That’s normally a strength of ours. So, particularly upsetting to weather that storm here.”

But there is a silver lining in it all, at least if Allison is right, with the Briton putting Mercedes’ Brazilian troubles down to set-up issues, and not a fundamental problem with the car.

“I mean, every weekend, the job is to land the car in a place where it is as happy as it can be. Sprint weekend put particular pressure on that because you sort of get one go at it, maybe an adjust in the one hour you get, and we clearly haven’t landed in it where it did its best work.

“And that’s not an excuse, because it is a sprint weekend for everyone. And that one hour is what everybody has. But we generally get that right but not here.”

He added: “It’s too early to understand what we did or what we should have done. But by the time we figured that out, which we should be able to do before Vegas, and hopefully, we’ll make sure we don’t fall down that little hole again.”

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