The 2022 Formula 1 season has been a turning point for Mercedes, a team accustomed to dominating the category since the start of the hybrid era, with eight consecutive constructors’ world titles.
The poor performance of its radical W13 with the pontoons reduced to the maximum has set off all the alarms within the Brackley factory, where they are still debating whether to continue with the development of the current single-seater or start focusing on the year 2023 given the difficulty that will arise. Presents with the budget limit.
Be that as it may, the silver arrows seemed to take a step forward at the Spanish Grand Prix, an event in which they came to fight for victory against Red Bull with George Russell and where they had a pace at the height of the winner with Lewis Hamilton , thanks to the updates that came to alleviate the problem of porpoising that they have accused so much.
However, in Monaco, the quintessential downforce circuit, the Germans suffered a lot from the bumpy asphalt. The reason for this is that the wheels on the new generation single-seaters are 18-inch in size, which reduces the amount of tire that dampens jumps, resulting in harder hits.
Explained in a simple way, the Formula 1 cars of the 2022 season have stiffer suspensions, and this entails having a harder steering. As Monaco is a place with very slow corners where agility is key, that is what weighed down the German team.
The Mercedes car did not have enough suspension flexibility to avoid the bumps of the urban track, and added to the size of the wheels and the very stiff springs, both Russell and Hamilton could not drive as they wanted. The star car tries to maintain ground stability through aerodynamics to maximize it, in addition to doing so to limit the porpoising they suffer on fast circuits.
In the Principality they could not equip the car with soft suspension , and that could be the reason why they complained so much in the press conferences during the weekend.
“I expected it,” said Hamilton in Monaco. “We weren’t good in slow, low-speed sections in the last race [in Barcelona], in the race it was good, but not over one lap, so we knew it would be tough.”
Those statements were the indication that they were not going well, and that they suffer on tracks of this style, so it is possible that something similar will happen in Hungary or Singapore if they do not change the design of the W13 much.
This is a different setback from porpoising , as they have recognized within the team, something they had not experienced before, and they were forced to increase the height of the rear suspension to correct it, something that translates into loss of downforce.
In addition, to make the car enter in slow corners, a front end that moves freely is needed, and for this reason they resorted to the Miami spoiler , but since it is not adapted to the characteristics of a taller car at the rear, it is likely that caused complications in the piloting of Russell and Hamilton.
They didn’t have a cutout on the underside of the endplates to provide better airflow through the tires and, in general, the entire car, and that’s why they went back to the part from a few weeks ago.
It is quite unknown if Mercedes will continue to suffer in the following appointments, but everything indicates that it will, since Baku and Montreal, despite being tracks where the maximum speeds of the category are reached, their curves are very slow.
In the case of Azerbaijan, the track is made up of straights and 90º turns, as well as a very narrow and slow section in the old part of the city, while in Canada, the straights give way to chicanes in which to enter the car in front of you is key.
After these two circuits, it will be Silverstone, a place that could seem more like a Mercedes playground than a place to suffer, since they have won eight of the last ten visits there.
The track that saw the birth of the highest category of motorsports only has one slow curve, The Loop , which arrives after the linked ones on the finish straight, and having turns similar to those of Barcelona, that is, fast, they may have a pace worthy of revalidating the victory that Lewis Hamilton achieved last season. Only the stopwatch will give the final answer.
