Toto Wolff believes high tyre pressures at the Belgian Grand Prix prevented Mercedes extracting the true potential of its car's downforce package, but says he is reluctant to blame Pirelli for the situation.
Tyres became a key talking point over the race weekend as high minimum pressures resulted in unusually high levels of degradation. After experiencing two high-speed failures at Spa-Francorchamps last season, tyre manufacturer Pirelli prescribed higher pressures and less extreme camber settings this year to ensure its tyres were not pushed beyond their limits.
However, the high pressures meant the tyres were prone to overheating and blistering when pushed too hard, which Wolff admits caused headaches for his team.
"I understand why Pirelli does it," he said. "We are in the last season of those tyres, we had failures last year and integrity is super-important for a tyre supplier. That's why we are blowing them up like balloons.
"All our development and all our simulations are being hurt by a tyre that is completely different in its behaviour than we were expecting. You have a contact patch that is half the size that was estimated, it's very difficult.
"But I don't want to put the blame on anybody because it's the same for everybody. It's just for us we have been consistent in our development and put the car on track in a way we thought was right, and then you're thrown off the track a little bit on a Friday or on a Saturday because the behaviour is completely different to expected. But this is what it is and hopefully next year with the larger tyres it will be different."
Wolff believes Mercedes is now at a tipping point where the current tyres are no longer capable of transferring the car's downforce to the track without suffering severe degradation. As a result, he says his team is increasingly building its race strategies around tyre management rather than pushing to the limit.
"If we were to switch off all the microphones maybe I would be moaning and complaining that this is unfair and we shouldn't be doing that with the tyres. I also don't like looking at the temperatures and planning a race strategy based on temperatures and tyre pressures, but it is what it is and I don't think it's sportsmanlike to find excuses. We just need to adapt as best as possible.
"We have a car with a lot of downforce and that is hurting us because we aren't able to put the downforce on track because in between the tyre just gives up. But again this is maybe even going too far already because they [Pirelli] are having a tough job giving us a product that is right -- right for the teams, right for the engineers, right for the spectators for a great show -- so there will always be somebody moaning."