Mercedes has vowed to catch F1’s runaway Renault-powered teams, as it risks losing millions in Concorde Agreement bonus money.<\/p>\n
Formerly looking set to finish second behind Red Bull in the lucrative constructors’ championship, Mercedes had a bad weekend in Japan and is now ten points behind Ferrari.<\/p>\n
Not only that, Lotus – whose Romain Grosjean was challenging for victory at Suzuka – is no longer far behind in the teams’ title chase.<\/p>\n
Mercedes, on the other hand, has lost ground.<\/p>\n
“Red Bull has taken a big step forward since Singapore,” Toto Wolff told Germany’s Auto Motor und Sport, adding that the similarly Renault-powered Lotus is now a few tenths ahead.<\/p>\n
“We need to analyse what they have done,” said Mercedes’ motor sport chief.<\/p>\n
The German report said Wolff suspects that the top two Renault-powered teams are now streaking away with a clever engine mapping and exhaust-blowing solution.<\/p>\n
“If that’s the case,” Wolff said, “we need to find out why we have missed something.<\/p>\n
“We think we know what they’re doing.\u00a0 The only question is whether we have the resources to implement something in the last four races.<\/p>\n
“Perhaps we will need to reallocate some resources,” he added.<\/p>\n
The problem is that, at Mercedes’ Brixforth engine facility, all the test benches are reportedly now being used for next year’s turbo V6 development.<\/p>\n
\u00a9 RIF | GMM<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Mercedes has vowed to catch F1’s runaway Renault-powered teams, as it risks losing millions in Concorde Agreement bonus money. Formerly looking set to finish second behind Red Bull in the lucrative constructors’ championship, Mercedes had a bad weekend in Japan and is now ten points behind Ferrari. Not only that, Lotus – whose Romain Grosjean …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[3],"tags":[5262,5340,34,129,5359],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19585"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19585"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19585\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19586,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19585\/revisions\/19586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.racinginfocus.com\/rif\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}