The wet opening practice session at Spa-Francorchamps left teams blind about choosing their best set-ups for the Belgian weekend – especially with parc ferme conditions kicking in from the start of Friday afternoon’s qualifying session.
Lewis Hamilton admitted it was a complete guessing game about how best to approach things, with Mercedes in the end covering its bases and opting for a lower and higher downforce configuration across both its cars.
While the higher downforce choice for Russell may have hurt him for the dry Q3 session, as he ended up seventh tenths slower than Hamilton, the choice could yet pay off if things are wet in the races or tyre degradation proves to be an issue.
Speaking about the disparity of performance between the two cars, with Hamilton starting third on Sunday and Russell down in eighth, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff told Sky Sports F1 that they had split choices.
“We have run two very different rear wings and configurations,” he said. “And you can see that Lewis is just able to extract more performance from that.”
Asked if Russell’s option had hurt him, Wolff said: “It does, he has a bit of a barn door on the back. But that can be advantageous for tyre performance on Sunday. It didn't help today so we need to assess why it didn't.”
Source: Autosport