![]() ![]() It is a case of let's understand the problem, let's work out how to improve it, because it's clear that other teams have done a better job." ![]() But for us, it's not a case of looking forward to those and worrying about the others. "There will be tracks that suit us more than these. Then coupled with that, there are the ride issues. And then you come to Monaco, and Baku where there is a big slow-speed dominance there. "The picture we took from there was that we needed to work on the slow speed. We weren't good enough in the slow speed. By a small margin, we were the quickest in the two fast corners. This all points to Mercedes performing better in high-speed corners (when the car isn't bouncing) than the low speed turns that are more common in Monaco and Baku.Īs Shovlin explains: "If you look at where we were making up that performance in Spain, we were by a small margin the fastest in a straight line. It topped the speed traps at the end of both the main straight and the run down to Turn 10, but more interestingly it was ahead throughout the high-speed Turn 3 right-hander, a place that shows the aero strengths of modern F1 cars. What GPS data from Barcelona showed was that when the W13 is in its happy place and working in the window where the porpoising is not holding it back, then it can do things that even shade the Red Bull and Ferrari cars.Ĭomparing the qualifying laps of George Russell, Charles Leclerc and Max Verstappen from the Spanish GP, the Mercedes is quickest overall in several areas of the track. While Monaco and Baku have been difficult, the lessons taken out of the weekend have served to emphasise just why the Spanish GP weekend was so good.Īnd it goes beyond just the fact that Barcelona is much smoother than the recent two street venues. But the long and short of it is we've got more work to do." "You can't distill out exactly what's aerodynamic and what's mechanical ride and the link to the compliance of the suspension and damping. The crux of Mercedes' problems is that its W13 produces its peak downforce performance when it runs very low to the ground. Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images It's very much like that the more you learn the more you realise you don't know." "Maybe it's taken longer than we would have thought but I think the problem is, as you sort of peel away the layers of the onion, there's more layers of the onion to go. ![]() It will always be there: you're having to engineer around it. "It isn't something that you can apply a resolution to and it's gone and you can forget about it. "We realise this is actually a very, very complicated problem," he said. Run the car high and soft enough to alleviate the bouncing and it's not fast enough, but go too low and too stiff and the porpoising is there with a vengeance.Īs head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin has explained, the battle between those two conflicting demands has been a perpetual headache. Mercedes' battle this year has been to run its car with ride height and suspension settings that can have it as close to the ground as possible, but without triggering the porpoising and bouncing that annoy the drivers and hurt its form. ![]() Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes-AMG, in Parc Ferme So was Barcelona a false dawn for Mercedes where circumstance flattered its car? Or have the last two races simply not played to the areas that the team has got on top of? The Mercedes had delivered its strongest form of the season and Hamilton's charge from the back to finish fifth left team boss Toto Wolff suggesting he had the fastest race car that day.īut any hopes that the Barcelona breakthrough signalled a turning point in Mercedes battles to tame its 2022 challenger have been rapidly dashed.īoth Monaco and Baku have proved to be incredibly difficult for its drivers – with the excessive porpoising that has been an ever-present hurting them both in competitive terms and the literal pain that Hamilton endured in Azerbaijan. ![]()
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