Mercedes technical director James Allison has explained how Oscar Piastri's uncharacteristically difficult weekend at the Circuit of the Americas prevented George Russell from fully utilising the pace of the W16.
The British driver finished the United States Grand Prix in sixth, one place behind the F1 drivers' championship leader, having spent most of the 56-lap race tucked up behind his McLaren MCL39.
This gave the impression that Russell and the Mercedes had lost the speed that saw him finish second in the one-third distance sprint.
However, the Brackley-based squad has since explained that the five-time grand prix winner was merely thwarted from extracting the true performance of the car.
When asked on the Mercedes Austin debrief is there was a reason for the disparity in fortunes between the sprint and grand prix, Allison maintained there was little change in the W16 across the weekend, saying: "Well, everyone changes their cars [between the sprint and qualifying for the grand prix].
"We made some minor changes to our own car to try to make it more competitive in qualifying, having learnt a little bit more as you go through the weekend.
"But everyone's doing that, so I guess that you could get changes in competitiveness if other people had struck lucky in those adjustments.
"But we didn't really see vast changes in our own car as a result of what we did. I can't speak for what the others managed to achieve."
Instead, Allison reasoned that being unable to pass the Australian hindered Russell from displaying the form he showed when chasing Max Verstappen the day before.
"And I think probably the more realistic thing for assessing the competitiveness is... with the surface overheating that comes on the tyres at that track, you sort of go at the pace of the person in front of you," he said.
"And in the sprint race, we had Verstappen in front of us. And you could see George was able to keep up with Verstappen there and have a decent run of things.
"But in the main race, we got away off the line OK, but didn't come out of the first corner well. And then we're stuck behind Piastri, who was having a tough weekend. And we're sort of stuck at Piastri's pace then.
"So the competitiveness is very much linked by who you're following rather than your car in free air."
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