Porpoising problems mean Mercedes still don’t know the true potential of their W13 car against their rivals.
The Brackley-based team has started 2022 well off the pace set by Ferrari and Red Bull, with Lewis Hamilton almost 0.7s off pole in Bahrain and George Russell almost a second behind in Saudi Arabia.
At the heart of Mercedes’ problems is the phenomenon known as porpoising, where the car bounces at high speed down the straights.
Porpoising Mercedes W13 (2022) #F1 #BahrainGP ?? pic.twitter.com/28FkBMWbuV
— Carlos Jimeno (@noticiascarlos) March 19, 2022
To limit this, the car has had to be raised but it is costing the team valuable downforce from the new ground effect floors.
“Fundamentally, we need to understand the problem better,” trackside engineering chief Andrew Shovlin admits.
“We’ve got some avenues that I think are giving us a good direction, but it’s taking a bit of time to get those parts on the car and we’re working very hard.
“We’re well aware that there are other teams that have got on top of this problem faster than we have, that’s not the standard we normally work to.
“Every bit of effort at the factory is going into getting on top of this, making sure we don’t neglect normal car development. But there’s a lot of work trying to pull us out of this situation at the moment.”
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But even if Mercedes does solve the porpoising issues, Shovlin admits there’s no guarantee the team would suddenly be leading the pack.
“That (fixing the porpoising) is probably priority number one because that’s ultimately preventing us from running the car where we’d like to run it for optimum performance,” he said.
“What we don’t know is, if we could just magically make that issue vanish, where would we actually be in terms of car pace: is the car fast enough or not? And it’s very difficult to answer that question.”
Mercedes caught the eye at the second pre-season test in Bahrain when it introduced a new ‘zero-pod’ design, with some reports claiming it could be worth up to a second in lap time compared to the more traditional sidepod design used at the first test.
However, Haas has revealed they too considered the ultra-slim bodywork approach before opting against it.
“This exact concept was our first design. We had it in the wind tunnel last July, and we already noticed there that it gives advantages in slow corners,” team boss Guenther Steiner was quoted by Auto Motor und Sport.
“But as an overall package, we saw greater potential in wide sidepods.”
