George Russell has warned that Mercedes' long-awaited aerodynamic upgrade is being 'neutralised' by extreme tyre overheating at the Sepang International Circuit, after the start to the Bahrain Grand Prix in Malaysia fell short of lofty pre-event expectations.
Russell was second quickest in FP1, finishing almost four-tenths of a second shy of Max Verstappen's benchmark time, but the Briton slipped to seventh in FP2, just ahead of team-mate Kimi Antonelli, as the W17 struggled.
Speaking after Friday's running, Russell explained how the Sepang conditions were working against the new parts bolted onto the car.
"With these warm conditions, combined with the aggressive tarmac and the characteristics of the circuit, the tyre degradation throughout practice was high," Russell said after FP2.
"That was as we expected coming into the weekend, but with the amount of overheating on the tyres, it slightly neutralises the performance of any extra downforce we've added with our update.
"The cars are operating in quite a different window to what we usually do, and I don't think we quite got ours into the place that we needed today.
"We will look to get on top of that overnight, and hopefully, if we do so, we can be in the fight at the front for the rest of the weekend."
Shovlin flags long-run concern
Mercedes brought its most substantial upgrade since the Canadian Grand Prix in May to Sepang, with seven new components including a reworked floor, diffuser, sidepod profile, rear suspension fairings and brake duct winglets.
Some paddock estimates suggested the package would deliver a gain of around three-tenths of a second per lap, although any advantage has been offset by the W17's tyre wear difficulties thus far.
Indeed, those projections looked some way off after Friday's sessions, with trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin confirming the team had struggled to extract the anticipated step.
"We were running the latest update package on both cars today, but rather than seeing the step in lap time that we had hoped for, we have been chasing a tricky balance and a fair amount of tyre overheating," Shovlin added.
"We had a few test items on the cars in FP1 that might have clouded the situation, but for FP2, we had both cars in a representative configuration, and it looked like we were still trailing, especially to the Red Bull.
"We've got some good ideas for setup changes to investigate during the overnight simulator work and will continue to analyse today's data to understand why we seem to lack a bit of pace.
"We're optimistic that with such a new package, these analyses will bear some fruit. The headline times are not especially representative, and we should be able to make some relatively easy progress on the single lap pace.
"Our concern is more the long run, where we seemed unusually offset on pace, and that is going to be the more challenging problem to solve."
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