In retrospect, James Allison ‘s words about the current season in a January 24 video from the Mercedes team seem almost prophetic.
“I imagine that, since the cars are so new and so different, one or two teams have made a mistake. They are going to have a terribly painful year,” explained the technical director of the successful team.
What’s more, Allison said five months ago that she supposed “everyone, to some degree, has missed or overlooked things. And we’ll look at other cars and think, ‘Oh, why didn’t we think of that?’ “.
We are now in the month of June, Mercedes have not won a grand prix in 2022 and the team is only third in the constructors’ championship, 118 points behind leaders Red Bull. Likewise, no other car has been as affected by tedious porpoising as the W13, which was developed under the leadership of Allison’s successor as technical director, Mike Elliott .
After Friday practice, Allison faced the television microphones and Sky asked her how she had damaged this year’s car. The veteran British engineer wasted no time joking, telling the reporter that she reminded him of his mother-in-law, before turning serious.
“I wish I could answer that question. Because if we had the answer, we would have already fixed the issues,” Allison said. “If you know what you’ve done wrong, you can diagnose how to fix it. Then we probably would have done it by now. Or at least almost [done].”
Allison has no problem openly admitting that, at Mercedes, they didn’t see the porpoising problem coming.
“To a lesser extent, that’s probably true of a lot of other teams.” However, he also assures that this has been a problem for a few weeks but “that we now have reasonably under control”.
“But we still have a car with very little rear grip, which has unpleasant driving characteristics because all the new cars have very stiff suspension and are very low to the ground. It’s still not a competitive package. Why isn’t it [it] , that will probably only become clearer to us, and to everyone else, as time goes on.”
How could Mercedes choose such a wrong path?
After Friday practice in Montreal, Lewis Hamilton seemed very disappointed. For the first time, the seven-time world champion accepted that he must work with the material his team has, but also start thinking about next year. Hamilton says the W13 doesn’t get any better no matter what they do, no matter how many fixes they try.
Despite all that, the reason for Mercedes’ problems, or at least part of them, can be found quickly.
CFD simulation tools were not programmed to detect a phenomenon such as porpoising , and the speeds that can be worked with in the wind tunnel are strictly limited by regulations. But aerodynamic porpoising only occurs at high speed.
The lack of usefulness of the wind tunnel
“The wind tunnel is not a useful environment to predict or fix this problem. And if your CFD tools aren’t set up for that kind of car behavior – and haven’t been for the last ten years – then you have to reinvent it.” when you realize you’ve fallen into a hole there. And [you have to] get back out,” said the engineer.
“If you look at last year’s single-seaters, each and every one of them was stratospherically high compared to the new cars, in terms of ground clearance. You could look under the car and see blue skies, even in the oft-quoted Mercedes of ‘low slant’, which was much taller than any car that’s in the pit lane now.”
“In the new F1, you find downforce when the car is low to the ground. It’s a difficult area to work on. On the one hand you want downforce and on the other hand you don’t want to hit the ground. You have to find the best compromise. But even the best possible behavior of the new cars is still difficult compared to what we had before,” Allison explained.
Downforce is not the problem
It has been known that the Mercedes W13 showed excellent values in the wind tunnel during the winter, in terms of downforce. This was also due to the ‘no sidepods’ concept, with minimal sides on the car. However, at the same time, they are a sensitive point, because they leave the underbody more exposed than in other single-seaters of this new generation.
Since the Barcelona update, Mercedes seems to be slowly getting a handle on the porpoising caused by aerodynamics. However, they now have the problem of bottoming , i.e. the contact of the flat bottom of the car with the track surface due to driving dynamics reasons, which has had a particularly negative effect on the street circuits of Monte Carlo, Baku and Montreal. .
