Mercedes boss Toto Wolff isn’t expecting the Silver Arrows squad to suffer at Silverstone from the cooling issues that undermined the team’s performance last time out in Austria.
The German manufacturer endured its first defeat of the season in the ninth round of the F1 world championship, beaten by Red Bull’s Max Verstappen and Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc but overcome first and foremost by cooling issues impacting the engine of its W10.
The problems forced both Valtteri Bottas and Lewis Hamilton to make extensive use of a ‘lift and coast’ strategy to keep their car’s temperatures in check.
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Wolff: Hamilton off-track freedom key to on-track performance
But Wolff is expecting this weekend’s British Grand Prix to take place in a very different environment.
“Austria exposed the biggest vulnerability of our car and it meant we couldn’t challenge for the win at any point of the weekend,” Wolff said in the team’s Silverstone preview.
“We’ve been working on our cooling for a while, but the combination of high temperatures and altitude in Spielberg ultimately meant that we had to do too much temperature management to be competitive.
“We will continue to work on this to have a better fighting chance at future races in the heat.
“Fortunately, the English summer is known for more moderate temperatures, so cooling should not be a major issue for us in Silverstone – although we’ve learned in the past that the weather at the British GP can be highly changeable.”
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