Mercedes Formula 1 boss Toto Wolff says that the cold conditions in Las Vegas put the W15 in a “sweet spot” that allowed George Russell and Lewis Hamilton to secure a surprise one-two finish.
In addition the team managed to avoid the tyre graining that hampered the race of main rivals Ferrari.
Russell won from pole, while Hamilton was able to charge through the field from 10th on the grid.
“It’s cold,” said Wolff when asked about the team’s strong form. “I think clearly you can correlate where we’ve been strong. We’ve been strong in Silverstone, we’ve been strong in Spa, and then here in Las Vegas.
“And I think it’s just keeping the car in its sweet spot, the tyres in the optimum window. It clearly shows that the car can be very, very quick.
“We were two seconds quicker than our competition at times when George was pushing, and for the rest of the day, he was just managing his pace.”
Wolff acknowledged that avoiding graining was a key factor in the race.
“It’s strange,” he said. “We were capable of pushing whenever we wanted to, and there was no graining appearing, neither on the medium, nor on the hard.
“You could see Charles [Leclerc] attempted a few times to put pressure on George, which he defended great. I don’t know what the outcome would have been of that, but the driving was exceptional.
“And Leclerc after a few laps couldn’t hold the pace, fell off. We didn’t hit a single sign of graining, nor degradation.”
Wolff had an intriguing theory about why things worked out for Mercedes: “It kind of spirals into the bad zone, if you break traction, and then it’s hot. You kind of swing out of the window all the time.
“And when you break traction here, that was actually helpful to keep the temperature at the time. So clearly, there is a pattern that some teams really love the cold, and extract a lot of performance.
“And there are some teams that have been so strong when it was hot – in Singapore, the McLarens, for example – and then they have dominated in the way that they just controlled it in the way they wanted. So it would be important to find a balance for next year.”
Regarding the direction for the W16 he added: “This one is a really important result, because you have fluctuations over the weekend, and then normally you can say we’ve been good here, then we’ve been not too good in that session.
“But here, every single session, we were ahead. So lots of good data that allow us to say, well, at least we know where the sweet spot is, this is where we need to be, and then trying to find out how we can get that target more often.”
