Whether the W13 is fast enough, Mercedes does not yet know

The culmination of Lewis Hamilton’s exclusion from Q1 at the Saudi Arabian GP, ​​caused by the inability of the team and the Brit to find a way to deal with the Mercedes W13’s bumps and get the tires to the ideal temperature level together , The F1 champion started the 2022 season with a different diameter than last year.

The Brackley team is forced to make huge compromises in building the W13 over the three days of competition to overcome the problem of jumps. And these compromises completely undermine the original philosophy of aerodynamic performance and tire management.

Despite her manual skills, the world champion of the last eight years cannot yet localize the problem and of course cannot say for sure if and when she will solve it. George Russell recently stated that this process could take until the end of the summer, which of course dampens the team’s hopes of retaining the F1 scepters.

The first priority of the Mercedes F1, as race engineer Andrew Sovlin has clarified, is to find a way to set the car up to face the porpoise and not upset its aerodynamic balance: “Because finally [το porpoising] prevents us from setting up the car properly to get the most out of it‘ said the Brit.

And he continued: “What we don’t know is if we assume that if we suddenly magically solve this problem, we will find ourselves in terms of performance. Is the car extremely fast or not? And it is very difficult to answer this question“.

As he said, the problem is more complicated than simply explaining the downward pressure exerted by lift on the straights until the car bottoms out and hits the tarmac. Many groups have addressed the problem by removing certain surfaces from the floor – but this option comes at a cost to the elevator’s overall performance. Mercedes is trying to find solutions without compromising on the W13’s aerodynamic performance in order to retain all the lift it originally predicted based on its design.

We need to solve the problem more efficiently

“If you can solve the problem of the jumps, you don’t have to be deprived of the lift‘ explained Sovlin.’Many groups, I think, exchange ideas with each other. We tried a notched bottom in the Bahrain tests, but we think what we found is the better solution overall. But so far we believe that what we did were simple fixes, we need to solve the problem more efficiently in order not to lose speed.

We need to better understand the problem. We’re taking some avenues that I think are going in the right direction, but it’s going to take us some time to get these new parts on the car. And we work very hard. We know very well that the other groups found solutions to this problem quicker than we did. And that’s not the data we normally work with“.

Andrew Sovlin concluded: “Some of the results we’re starting to see are interesting, but obviously we haven’t made a big enough move yet. The most dangerous thing now is to assume that we are beginning to understand the problem. We learn every day. I hope we can see the problem clearly in the relatively immediate future. We don’t look blindly, but we must act quickly.

We are under no illusions about our performance gap and in absolute terms it was bigger in Jeddah than in Bahrain. But we still have a lot to find, both for the qualifying tests and for the rounds of the race, when it comes to competing with the Ferrari and Red Bull cars. Our difference with the following teams gives us a little room to work and try to find solutions to improve the car’s performance“.