Mercedes believe the cause of their car’s poor performance in high-speed corners is something fundamental to its design.
The team’s drivers found it difficult to stay close to their rivals through the quickest corners at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit last weekend.“Fundamentally the limitations that we had in qualifying and the race, they were broadly the same for both,” said Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin in a video published by the team. “So it’s telling you it’s not a small difference, it’s not a tiny bit of camber or a spring or bar here and there, it’s something more fundamental that we need to dig into and understand.”
The team has identified three main reasons why their car couldn’t keep up with the competition in the quickest corners.
“One of them was the balance wasn’t great,” said Shovlin. “So those very fast corners [where] the walls aren’t particularly far away [are] the ones where the driver wants a lot of confidence and quite often we were snapping to oversteer if they really leant on the tyres. You can easily imagine how unsettling that is for the for the drivers. That was a factor in qualifying and the race.
“In qualifying we were also suffering a bit with the bouncing. That was less of a problem in the race: There’s more fuel in the car, you’re going a bit slower and that seemed to calm it down and it wasn’t such an issue.
“Then the big one is we don’t really have enough grip there. So that’s one of the things that we are working hard on this week because Melbourne has a similar nature of corners. We’re doing a lot of work to try and understand why did we not seem to have the grip of some of our close competitors.”
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He believes Lewis Hamilton and George Russell were losing “around three or fourth tenths” of a second per lap to their rivals through the quickest corners. However the team are unwilling to risk sacrificing its car’s strengths to address its key weakness.
“We were actually one of the fastest cars, if not the fastest car, in a straight line,” said Shovlin. “So we’re on quite a light wing level and what we could do is slow ourselves down in sector two and three to try and recover a bit of that time in sector one.
“But ideally we’d like to keep that and work out a way to try and improve sector one by means other than just putting a load more downforce on the car and then paying the price for it on the straight.”
Mercedes are using the two-week gap between the second and third rounds to decide how best to tackle the problem at the Australian Grand Prix.
“There’s definitely data that we’re picking through from Jeddah,” said Shovlin. “We’re also looking at data from the Bahrain race and the Bahrain test and we’ll come up with a plan for how we approach free practice in Melbourne.
“But it’s not just based on what we did in Jeddah. There’s a lot of work going on within the aerodynamics department, vehicle dynamics department, we’re trying to design some experiments there that will hopefully give us a direction that’s good for performance.”
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BlueChris (@bluechris)
13th March 2024, 19:25
Three years have passed and still they try to figure out what is the problem .
I really don’t know what is the problem as most of us here but what i know is that the team the last years is loosing people from all departments, have lost Hamilton and who knows what else is coming.
I hope for the sake of the sport they will find their mojo back because i think the time for excuses had long gone.
Yellow Baron
13th March 2024, 21:01
Which makes you think max must have been bluffing about potentially leaving, although making a point he wants Marko to stay. No way is it a good idea for him to leave. Aston probably has a better chance of nailing the new regs than mercedes at this point.
Nick T.
14th March 2024, 1:32
I’d love to see him leave and how quickly whoever replaced him is suddenly getting comments like “we’ve run out of superlatives to describe him!” There are about 5 drivers on the grid who’d have have similar levels of mind numbingly boring dominance and 10+ who’d cruise to titles, but with many blown races to make it more entertaining.
Max is no doubt one of our GOATs, but just another annoying aspect of his dominance are the embarrassing levels of “we’ve never seen the like” similar to the nonsense we heard about Lewis when Bottas was his “competition.”
BasCB (@bascb)
16th March 2024, 12:28
It would certainly be interesting to see how his replacement would fare, how Perez would fare, and how Max would do at a team like Mercedes, yeah.
Michael (@freelittlebirds)
13th March 2024, 20:03
This is the key problem – you cannot compete in F1 let alone challenge Red Bull without being strong in every department. The days of the Mercs outpowering the competition and winning are done. They even struggled on many circuits there too.
Red Bull has it all
the best designed car (for the past decade)
the best engine
the most confident driver
the best pit crew
the best strategists who will stop at nothing to ensure that Verstappen wins
You want to focus in one area and be a jack of all traces? Sure, but don’t expect to win anything.
Mr B
13th March 2024, 20:18
You’re not wrong, all those years that Red Bull had to chase down the Mercedes with a supremely dominant engine led them to perfecting every other area of the team. Once some sort of engine party was formed and we moved to a more aerodynamic period they found themselves at the head of the field again and by some considerable margin. It really is very impressive.
Osnola
14th March 2024, 20:52
And you are forgetting (not by accident;)
*The best driver!
Shimks (@shimks)
13th March 2024, 20:52
No wonder HAM jumped ship.
Paul2013
13th March 2024, 20:54
I know a poem
“Roses are red
Violets are blue
Fernando is faster than you”
Simon
13th March 2024, 21:51
With Rob Smedley’s voiceover :)
mooa42
13th March 2024, 22:32
I’m a bit sick of hearing about Mercedes high speed deficit!
I’d like to hear a bit more about how Mclaren is hoping to improve their slow and mid speed corners and their straight line speed with DRS enabled.
Any stories on this?
Tarn Burton (@yitzchak)
13th March 2024, 23:59
I’m with you. I’d love to see McLaren toe-to-toe with Red Bull and leave Merc in the dust. Even Aston Martin would do,
Anthony H. Tellier
14th March 2024, 14:11
Perhaps Sky Sports has a fix for #44?
pcxmac (@pcxmac)
14th March 2024, 10:09
Im sure it has nothing to do with the power unit. Nothing at all. Its not like Red Bull have almost a 100 bhp advantage and can run all the down force they want.
The Dolphins
14th March 2024, 14:33
@pcxmac they must be tuning down the engines in the VCARBs if they have such a power advantage
pcxmac (@pcxmac)
16th March 2024, 18:43
Look at what happened to Williams after Toto divested. They went backwards mate. Pretty sure thats how this formula works these days in F1. Big money picks who wins and loses.