Schumacher : W-Duct not a game-changer

Schumacher believes some people are ’a little too excited’ about his team’s latest innovation.
Mercedes’ Michael Schumacher today denied the innovative wing stalling system on the W03 would confer a huge qualifying advantage to his team in Malaysia.

Given the very long straights at Sepang, there has been conjecture that the so-called ‘W-Duct’ could give the Mercedes a straight-line speed boost that would put it on pole position. Speaking in the official FIA press conference the three time Malaysian Grand Prix winner denied this was the case.

“Certainly not,” said Michael. “There is no doubt that we have an innovation that gives us some performance but I don’t think that it is a huge performance and that we only live from this. We’ll find out. I can’t really quantify this… I think some get a little bit too excited about this compared to reality but that’s the usual story.”

Schumacher did qualify his comments, and say that the W03 would perhaps be better suited to Sepang than it was to Albert Park and therefore have a ‘slight advantage’ on this circuit compared to its performance a week ago. Less ambiguous was Schumacher’s belief that his gearbox problems in Melbourne were unique, and not something likely to be repeated. “It was a one-off. We did a few thousand kilometres in winter testing and never had this issue. We understood it though [in Albert Park], and fixed it.”

Overall the seven times world champion pronounced himself happy with Mercedes’ new car, saying it was a step forward on its predecessors. “The basic positive is that we definitely have a much-improved car compared to last year. Still we have to learn it and understand it in all circumstances to take the benefit and the full performance from it, as we have seen in the race with Nico [Rosberg, team-mate]. So there is still something to learn, but we’re positive that we can improve quite a bit – race pace in particular.”