Sunday’s F1 news sees focus turn to Las Vegas, with the most hotly-anticipated race for some time looming large on the F1 calendar.
Preparations in Nevada are ramping up as Formula 1 prepares to descend on the city, with a huge amount of effort having already gone in to getting it race-ready – playing card-style kerbs included.
Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has said the team have gone into detail to try and work out where their problems were at Interlagos last weekend, and have found the source of it.
Both Lewis Hamilton and George Russell had low straight-line speed and were swallowed up by quicker cars in DRS zones last Sunday, leaving Hamilton down in eighth and Russell having to retire through concerns about his power unit.
But with two races to go, Mercedes believe they now know where they went wrong in Sao Paulo.
“After promising performances in the US and Mexico, we didn’t perform at our best in Brazil,” Wolff said.
“We have been hard at work to identify the wrong turn we took with the set-up; we have done that. We understand our mistakes and can explain our performance loss to the field. That’s important as we look to secure P2 in the Constructors’ Championship.
Pirelli motorsport boss Mario Isola believes F1’s tyre manufacturer are going to be at the centre of conversation in Las Vegas, with concerns about tyre warm-up at the forefront of people’s minds.
The extremely long straights around the new Vegas track and cold night temperatures, forecast to be as low as 3°C, mean that tyre warm-up will be a huge issue for the drivers and teams at the weekend.
Despite using the softest tyres in the Pirelli range, the layout and temperatures might make life difficult for the drivers over the course of a stint.
“I believe that we are going to talk about Pirelli in Vegas because of the temperature,” Isola admitted.
“The asphalt is quite smooth according to the information I have and so the level of grip will be very poor, I can anticipate this.
“Even if we selected the three softest compounds in the range, I can imagine that with these super cool conditions and a circuit that is not generating a lot of energy into the tyre, the warm up will be tricky.”
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