Mercedes technical director James Allison has defended the team’s rookie driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli, who has only scored points once in the last seven rounds.
The 18-year-old driver appeared close to tears after being eliminated in the first round of qualifying twice at the Belgian Grand Prix. However Allison concurred with George Russell’s view that the team has made mistakes with its car’s development direction in recent races which have compromised Antonelli’s performance.
“I think he’s, like the rest of us, massively fed up with a string of results that are well below what we were collectively achieving earlier in the year,” said Allison in a video released by the team. “I hope he takes some solace from the fact that we tell him, and it’s demonstrably a fact, that we have taken the wrong steps with the car, making our team less competitive, and that he is paying the price for that, as is George.
“If the car isn’t where it needs to be, then it will be a struggle getting through the qualifying stages in your rookie season in F1. And it’s utterly clear to all of us that the thing we need to do is make the car better, and then Kimi’s fortunes will reverse with that.
“Hopefully he’s listening to us as we say those reassuring words, because we absolutely know that he is putting in the effort on his side of that bargain.”
Allison said the team’s performance in recent races compared to their rivals show their problems are of their own making.
“When you have a situation where seemingly everybody’s improved by the same amount and you’ve just slipped backwards, more often than not when that happens it’s because you have made yourself worse by that amount. It isn’t that everyone magically has put on the same size upgrade and crept up around you through that.”
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Both drivers have said the W16 has become more difficult to handle in recent rounds, said Allison.
“Even if you ignore the lap times completely, you ignore the points that we are not getting like we did earlier in the year, and you just focus on what the drivers are telling us about the car, they’re telling us that the car of today and of the last handful of races is suffering from instability under braking in high speed and turning in at high speed, in a way that it wasn’t doing earlier in the year.
“Earlier in the year, it was a relatively easy car to set up, relatively easy to pitch it up in qualifying for it to do okay. It was not enough to be championship competitive but it was a whole sight easier to deal with than the one we have to do today.”
Allison is hopeful the team will be able to undo the problems they have introduced.
“The downside, of course, is it’s dispiriting when we’ve made a lot of effort to improve the car, and we have not. The upside of it is that if you’ve done it yourself, which we have, it is comparatively easier to unpick that, because you just have to retrace your steps a bit, understand which of the steps you took that was in the wrong direction, and then move forward from there.”
Mercedes will aim to correct the problems at the last race before the summer break at the Hungaroring this weekend.
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“Our thoughts are to work as effectively as we can in investigating the things that we may have done that have made things worse, to hopefully pick off the most likely candidates and get that sorted in Hungary,” said Allison.
“If we’re fortunate, then to steady the ship a bit there and go into the summer break going ‘okay, that was no fun, but at least we can look forward to the second half of the year with that behind us. And if it’s not those things then we’ll go to the next candidate at the next race and so on.”
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