Mercedes performance improves after modifications to its racing car
After qualifying for the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix ended in March, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff condemned his own car.
Lewis Hamilton and George Russell, the team’s drivers, had finished more than six-tenths of a second behind the time of reigning champion Max Verstappen of Red Bull, which is a huge gap in Formula 1.
“We got the physics wrong, and now we have to correct it,” Wolff said. “We have done our very best and now we need to regroup, sit down with the engineers and determine the development direction we want to take to win races.
“We met our goals and that showed us that it’s just not good enough.”
Weeks later, at the Monaco Grand Prix, Mercedes introduced an improved version of its W14 car. With new side pods, the aerodynamic shape was different. There was also a new floor and front suspension.
There will be a new front wing for this weekend’s British Grand Prix at Silverstone.
Wolff’s words in Bahrain underlined the seriousness of the team’s situation a year after the introduction of new aerodynamic regulations last season, which saw the team win just once.
“It’s not a very mystical process,” James Allison, the team’s technical director, said in an interview about the changes to the car. “It’s almost identical what happens whether the boss makes a comment like that or doesn’t say anything at all. It’s all predetermined quite a long time in advance.
“At the beginning of the year, long before we know if the car is good, bad or indifferent, we have a hypothetical amount of our budget and a portion of our people’s time, once the car rolls, for the in-season upgrade battle.”
The floor and front wing, he said, were “planned before the car turned a wheel,” while there were a range of body options that he described as “background tasks” assessed via computational fluid dynamics, a digital form of aerodynamic analysis.
“The thing that changed with the car spinning a wheel was the suspension,” said Allison. “It wasn’t a planned upgrade because normally you wouldn’t mess with that during a season because it’s complicated, but we thought it would be a good investment.”
The trigger for making such a fundamental change to the car was a greater appreciation for the regulations after a season in which Mercedes was “a bit over our heads in bouncing,” Allison said.
A by-product of the rules designed to facilitate overtaking and make the races more exciting was porpoise, a violent up and down motion caused by the stalling of the airflow under the car. Mercedes struggled more than most.
“This generation of cars is not very pleasant to drive compared to the older cars, which had gotten to a very refined state,” said Allison. “Because it’s close to the ground, so stiffly sprung and with that big front wing on it, they’re kind of a handful.”
Mercedes felt it could make its existing suspension work with the aerodynamics, but the focus was diverted while trying to solve the porpoise.
Once the team got that sorted out, it then focused on other parts of the car, leading to the suspension change and the introduction of an anti-dive system, Allison said, that reduces a car’s forward diving under braking.
“We could and should have done that sooner,” he said. “This year, with the car tamer and the underlying behavior being more obvious, we were able to look at it and do something.”
After his performance at the Spanish Grand Prix, Hamilton, a seven-time champion, said the car was “the best of the last year and a half”, and that the team once again has “its North Star”.
“We know where to go,” he said. “We don’t know everything about how to get there, but we know we can get there together if we keep our wits about us and focus on the science.”
But there are limits to how fast a car can be developed.
In 2021, Formula 1 introduced the budget cap intended to make the teams more equal and to ensure that Mercedes, Ferrari and Red Bull could no longer spend uncontrolled money on the development of their cars. After capping $145 million that year, it’s $135 million this season.
Mercedes chief operating officer Rob Thomas said the team was “never wasteful”, but the budget cap has made the entire organization more aware of costs.
“One of the things we had to look at was how many parts we actually made,” said Thomas in an interview. “It gets quite complicated when you think about the many thousands of parts that make up a car.
“We had to sharpen up a lot because we discovered we weren’t as efficient as we thought. It made us look hard at it.
Taking the floor of a car as an example, he said wear and tear would have led to the entire part being replaced in the past. Not now.
“We work smarter with the engineers and say ‘Which parts of the floor actually wear out?’ so our design is such that we can replace certain parts of the floor rather than the entire floor,” he said.
The budget cap has also reduced the number of spare parts the team takes to a Grand Prix.
“What we’re taking to a track now, we never would have done three years ago because we were too scared,” said Thomas.
“What happens if the two cars have an incident and you don’t have a spare? You’re in trouble. But we have more confidence in our processes.”
Allison said Mercedes was now more discriminatory.
“There’s a higher bar for a part that needs to be cleared before we spend money on it,” he said.
“A front wing costs no less than a front wing used to cost, but it’s now about how many iterations we’ll do in a year and then when we do an iteration, how little we dare to do means the inventory cost comes down. “
Even with an upgraded car, it will be updated during the season. At the same time, the team will expand its development plans for next year’s car, the W15.
“The plan for when you start winding down this car and winding up the next one, an initial guess of that plan existed long before the car was running,” Allison said of the W14. “And then, depending on the battle you’re fighting, you’re going to skew that plan one way or another.”