Mercedes F1 representative “need to improve pit stop speed”[F1-Gate .com]

Toto Wolg, team representative for Mercedes F1, said the team is working to speed up the pit stop procedure following lagging behind both Ferrari and Red Bull in the 2022 F1 opening round at the Bahrain Grand Prix.

The active Constructors’ World Champion, Mercedes F1, has a lot of problems to fix in order to make the W13 a race-winning car, but the pit stop was barely noticed.

The Mercedes F1 pit crew was significantly slower than both Ferrari and Red Bull. Lewis Hamilton and George Russell spent more time in the pits than their rivals.

All six drivers made three pit stops in Bahrain, with Lewis Hamilton’s stop at 1: 16.576 in the time from entrance to exit, while George Russell’s was 1: 16.976. Both drivers are more than two seconds slower than Red Bull’s Max Verstappen’s Red Bull (1: 14.236) and Sergio Perez (1: 14.166), and Ferrari’s driver is Charles Leclerc at 1: 14.152. , Carlos Sainz was even faster at 1’13.391.

Sergio Perez recorded the fastest stop in the race in 24.2 seconds. This is one second faster than Hamilton’s average time of 25.5 seconds.

The 2022 pit stop was expected to be slower than the previous year due to the large wheels and wheel covers, but Mercedes is significantly behind.

Mercedes F1 team representative Toto Wolff emphasized the increase in weight, saying it was “impossible” to achieve the previous year’s speed because the front wheels are 3 kilograms heavier and the rear wheels are 4 kilograms heavier. “It’s not easy to put an impact wrench on the rim,” he said.

“That’s not an explanation we haven’t performed there yet,” Toto Wolff told motorsport-total.com.

“If we want to be at the top, we need to do that too.”

But Toto Wolff defended the mechanics that even Red Bull, known for its quickstops, is slower than before.

The speed of the pit stop was not Toto Wolff’s only concern in Bahrain. Running behind his rivals, he replaced Lewis Hamilton’s soft tyres with hard tyres, but that strategy made him even more retreat.

“We were at a level where we might fight at a pure pace before the tire degradation on soft tires. We mightn’t find where Leclerc was, but we were fighting others,” Toto Wolff told Sky Sports F1.

“The degradation was so big that I tried to make a difference by wearing hardware today, but it was one second late per lap, so I learned a lesson.”

Category: Category: F1 / Mercedes