Mercedes has been the most difficult team to interpret since the beginning of the year. In the early stages of the season the W13 showed evident lack of performance, only to be the protagonist of great leaps in competitiveness from one track to another in the second half of the championship. Starting from July, the Silver Arrows instead imposed themselves as the third force with increasing consistency, progressively approaching the leading duo, to the point of conquering a pole position and aiming for victory in the Netherlands. From the statements of the pilots and technical representatives of the team, there is an increasing awareness of the limits of the W13, an encouraging sign in view of the 2023 project.
While Red Bull and Ferrari were slowed down on and off by balance issues during the championship, Mercedes, on the other hand, seems to lack pure performance. At the Thursday press conference in Zandvoort, George Russell pointed out some of the many shortcomings of the W13: “We need to find more downforce and maybe make our car a little more [aerodinamicamente] efficient”. The imperative for Mercedes is therefore to improve all-round aerodynamics, increasing downforce and reducing drag, although on the latter front important steps have been taken since the beginning of the season thanks to the development of new rear wings.
However, the limits of the silver arrows go far beyond the aerodynamic look alone. On several occasions the team representatives have pointed out the difficulty for the team to get the car into the correct tire operating window, especially on the flying lap. Listening to Hamilton and Russell’s qualifying radio teams, the obsessive attention of their respective engineers emerges in constantly calibrating the speed with which to perform the preparation lap, precisely because of the difficulty in warming up the tires sufficiently without exceeding in the opposite extreme. This gap is attributable to two factors, the first of which is the level of aerodynamic load of the single-seater on which the vertical energy transferred to the tires depends. In Italy, the Technical Director Andrew Shoviln underlined just how on low-load tracks such as Spa and Monza the W13 suffers even more: “We expected Monza to be a difficult track for us. We hoped it wasn’t as treacherous as Spa, but we think that the jumps in performance mainly depend on the change in load level from track to track”.
At the same time, on certain tracks, the Stella technicians are more easily able to find the optimal compromise for the single-seater, thus hitting the correct operating window. This occurs on tracks with a reduced dispersion of speed and types of curves, where the set-up can give greater priority to certain aspects without having to focus on various dynamics. Above all, it becomes easier to match the mechanical behavior of the W13, prevailing at low mileage, with the aerodynamic one that is the priority at high speeds. Hence, at Zandvoort, a track where aerodynamic efficiency is not a priority, whose high load accelerates the temperature of the tires and where the relative homogeneity of the curves facilitates the search for the set-up, the Mercedes have had their best week- end in season.
From this point of view, the description of Zandvoort largely coincides with that of Singapore, the next stage in the world championship. However, Russell points out a further factor that could hinder W13: “On paper, Singapore should fit our car better. But when we look at the citizens of Munich and Baku, our car didn’t perform very well on bumpy tarmacs”. The unstable Mercedes on the asphalt was a recurring theme throughout the season. Several clues that emerged during the championship suggest that the Silver Arrows suffer or have suffered from aerodynamic instability, with strong variations in the generated load induced by the passage of the cars on the bumps and the destabilization of the aerodynamic platform. The concern addressed to a citizen like Singapore, however, where the low mileage limits the aerodynamic forces at play, suggests that the problem may also be of a mechanical nature.
The regulatory change of 2022 has Compared to the past, the use of certain components in the internal suspension unit is prohibited, such as inerters, valves sensitive to acceleration and hydraulic control of the shock absorbers, not to be confused with the active suspension. Overall, important degrees of freedom and external acceleration response tools for suspension calibration have disappeared, making it even more complex to decouple the different mechanical and aerodynamic stabilization needs of the car. Shovlin’s words could also refer to this, namely a difficulty for engineers in adapting the mechanical set-up to compensate for the low level of load imposed by certain tracks. The technical narrative of the championship has mainly focused on the aerodynamic interpretation of the new regulation by the teams, but the correct mechanical philosophy of suspensions it was equally important.
Compared to the first half of the year, positive for Mercedes is the awareness finally reached of the criticisms of the W13 and of the road to be taken for 2023. A picture opposite to that of last spring, where experiments and steps followed one another in the team forward alternating with others backwards that told of a general confusion. Furthermore, the fact that, according to Toto Wolff, the team has postponed the chassis and suspension choices for next year’s car, suggests that the team wants to capitalize on every single lesson learned on the disappointing W13.
