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Battle with Ferrari will be a 'hell of a ride,' says Mercedes boss
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff anticipates a “hell of a ride” in the team’s battle with Ferrari over the course of 2017.
The year’s first qualifying session saw the Silver Arrows of Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas split by the Ferrari of Sebastian Vettel, giving us the first signs of the real competitive order. Testing had suggested that Ferrari had an edge.
“I think it's important to get your own house in order,” said Wolff. “And then if you consider yourself where you need to be then you can assess the kind of competitive order. And we knew that in Barcelona they were extremely strong, and we knew also that there were areas in which we needed to improve.
“And I think today is the first time where you can make a proper assessment in terms of where we are with the car, and you can see that it is very close between Ferrari and ourselves. It's going to be a hell of a ride over the next 20 races.”
Wolff stressed how hard the team had worked since testing concluded, comparing the situation with the soul-searching that followed the disappointing performance in the 2015 Singapore GP.
“Clearly the two weeks after the second Barcelona test have been extremely busy in various areas in the factory and I'm really proud, because the tests didn't go as expected. And it wasn't one thing but it was multiple causes which we identified we needed to improve.
“It was a little bit like a situation we had at Singapore two years ago, and we analyzed the areas of concern. And when we put the car on the track on the Friday morning in Melbourne we sorted most of them and you see the result today.”
Wolff said that the fact that the team has maintained its form despite the change of regulations was a particular source of satisfaction.
“If I'm right or if we're right there was no team that was able to maintain that level of performance through such am major regulation change, and that was a factor of motivation for us. As much as we've been in this situation in past years that we have been on pole, I think it was a really good achievement that we've been able to keep ourselves competitive and the team to beat out there and that was not a given.
“So I think considering that fact for the start of the season we've been doing well. As you know we weren't keen on these regulations because we believed there could be an impact on the racing side which we haven't seen yet but it is what it is and when the decision was taken last year we went into competition mode and tried to have the best possible, the best possible chassis, and here we are.”
Responding to suggestions that the car is 5kgs overweight, he said: “I don't want to go too much into detail but it's an area we can definitely improve with new regulations and the size of the cars you need to balance out all the time between performance parts and the weight and that's an ongoing exercise which we are doing.”
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