How Mercedes finally tamed its victorious W13 beast

George Russell is a now a grand prix winner. Mercedes has finally won a race in 2022. They did not luck into it; it was a commanding performance through the Interlagos weekend. The foundation was Russell’s sprint victory of Saturday and the P1 starting position that gave him for the main event. An off-form Red Bull meant that Russell’s main competition was team-mate Lewis Hamilton who, after clashing with Max Verstappen and losing six places, fought his way back up to second. But even a late race safety car restart, with Hamilton tight in his wheel tracks, wasn’t enough to blow Russell off course. There was also a water leak from around half-distance, but he knew nothing of that until after the race as the team elected not to tell him. He already had enough to think about.

Merc’s building advantage

The Mercedes W13 has looked a much more potent threat ever since its Austin upgrade which combined a tweaked front wing and floor with a significant weight reduction. That combined with the team’s better understanding of the narrow set-up window in which it must run the car is what saw Hamilton a threat to Verstappen for a time in Austin, Russell a pole contender in Mexico. It’s always been good on the tyres but that didn’t really mean much when Red Bull and Ferrari were so far ahead. But it suddenly matters a lot when the car is somewhere near the pace.

The reason why it’s good on the tyres in the race is also why it can struggle to get them up to temperature in qualifying on the first lap. But with the sprint format, the starting positions for the Grand Prix weren’t wholly determined by its single lap performance. In qualifying for the sprint Russell and Hamilton (who was running a lower downforce wing than Russell) had qualified only third and eighth in the single lap window of Q3. In the drier Q2 session, they’d been only fourth and ninth, 0.5sec adrift of Verstappen’s Red Bull. That trait is still there.

But in the sprint itself, they were first and third. With the Ferrari of second-place sprint finisher Carlos Sainz taking a five-place PU grid penalty, that made it an all-Mercedes front row. Great tyre behaviour and the front row was a formidable combination.

Red Bull’s struggles

But Mercedes was not beating a fully on-form, happy, Red Bull. The RB18 was struggling for a front end, especially as the track cooled and the rears began to push the front on. “We’ve just got way too much front deg no matter which tyre we are on,” said Verstappen on Saturday.

Believing that even 24 laps would be too much for a set of softs with that level of degradation, Red Bull put him on mediums for his front row start alongside Kevin Magnussen’s pole-setting Haas. He was leading by lap two, but as soon as Russell, Sainz and Hamilton also threaded their way around the Haas, the game was up for Verstappen. “We thought he’d struggle a bit in the early laps bringing the mediums up to temperature,” related Christian Horner, “but then he’d pull away. But he just got even worse deg!”

The medium was not a great tyre around here, the soft far superior, faster and with a comparable range. Everyone bar Verstappen (and Nicholas Latifi) used it for the sprint. The medium made the Red Bull look worse than it was on Saturday – but it still wasn’t great.

At least Verstappen’s use of the medium for the sprint ensured he had two sets of new softs for what was set to be a two-stop race on Sunday. Ordinarily, that might have been considered a potent advantage over two Mercs which had only one new and one scrubbed set each. But not if the tyre deg was too high and you were starting from the row behind.