Mercedes have had a difficult season to date as they have suffered from excessive porpoising and rebounding due to the nature of the W13 with narrow sidepods and wider floor.
However, as more and more teams copy rival Red Bull’s sidepod solution, hinting that it is the best way forward, Mercedes has recognized that they are not arrogant enough to dismiss the concept.
While they don’t believe the answers to their problems are simply changing sidepods and somehow ‘copying’ Red Bull , they do say they are evaluating what the Milton Keynes -based team has done to try to understand if there are more benefits to their gamble. .
When asked by Motorsport.com about the possibility of switching to the Red Bull concept, Mercedes technical director Mike Elliott said: “I think chassis-wise, the part that’s visibly different, the one you’re referring to, isn’t probably the main differentiator. It’s the details in the floor design.”
“We’ve looked at some of the concepts that go in that direction. I’m not going to say which way we’re going to go, but we’re going to look at that [Red Bull solution].”
“I think it would be silly to be arrogant and not think that you may have been wrong, and not go look at what everyone else is doing.”
“And that doesn’t mean just looking at the Red Bull concept, it’s also looking at everyone on the grid and seeing what looks interesting and why.
Elliott explained that rather than thinking of a direct copy of the Red Bull design bringing benefits, the bottom line for Mercedes is to understand what benefits come from that concept.
“I think as an ex-aerodynamicist, what you’re trying to do at all times is understand what you think is going on with the flow that’s going through the car,” he said.
“You work from what you want to do with the flow, and then you develop the chassis shapes from there.”
“So let’s go look at it and make a decision: what do we think the Red Bull chassis does and why does it do it? And the same for all the other cars on the grid. Then we’ll see what we can learn and also what we can Apply”.
“Maybe we’ll see changes this year. Maybe we’ll see changes next year. Or maybe we stay where we are. I think those are the questions we’re going to try to answer.”
Mercedes has brought a number of updates for this weekend’s British Grand Prix, which Elliott explained are finally focused on getting more performance now that the team appears to have resolved the worst phase of its problem with porpoising and the bounces.
“I think it’s pretty obvious, looking at the car, that we made a big change in Barcelona because of the way we were working with the aerodynamics,” he said.
“By doing that, we managed to minimize the impact of the rebound. But we did it by probably compromising some of the aerodynamic performance of the car.”
“So [this upgrade] was really about trying to add performance to the car and just improve lap time. The aim is to do that without re-compromising rebound or any other negatives that we might have on the car.”
