Yahoo Autos Mercedes ‘on the back foot’ with cost cap after crashes
Mercedes is going to have to limit the parts it manufactures due to cost cap pressures caused by recent heavy crashes, according to team principal Toto Wolff.
George Russell crashed heavily in qualifying in Austin and did so again in practice in Mexico City, despite running different specifications of car both times. That followed a big crash for Kimi Antonelli on his FP1 debut at Monza three races before the triple header, and Wolff says the cumulative cost will have an impact on Mercedes’ plans for the rest of the season.
“Kimi’s crash at Monza, George’s crash in Austin, George’s crash [in Mexico], which… I love a driver to push, and I’d rather him crash and we know what the car is capable of doing than not,” Wolff said. “In cost cap land, that’s a tricky situation, so these three shunts put us on the back foot.
“Certainly the one that happened [in FP1 in Mexico] was massive. We had to opt for a completely new chassis. That is a tremendous hit on the cost cap. And we probably have to dial down on what we put on the car.
“So we will be having two upgrade packages in Brazil, two floors, but that’s basically it. There’s nothing else that’s going to come. We have certain limitation on parts where we need to be creative, how we’re managing this, and certainly there is an impact. There is an impact on how many development parts we can put on the car, because the answer is zero.”
Despite the limitations on parts and concerns over the budget cap, Wolff says he never felt it would be right to stop Russell and Lewis Hamilton from racing each other in Mexico, allowing them to fight over fourth place.
“They’re so good and so experienced that we allow the racing. At the beginning, I have no doubt, there was not a feeling where I thought, it’s getting a bit hairy. I think we made the call to George at the end where it was clear that Lewis had the faster car, that maybe that one defense on the straight was a bit of a late move. I don’t have any doubts about the two.”
