Since the start of the 2022 Formula 1 season, the Mercedes team has been looking in every possible way to try to evolve their W13 to leave behind the problem of porpoising that is costing them so much lap time.
With the sidepod design stripped down to a bare minimum, they frightened in winter testing in Bahrain, but just a week later their single-seater philosophy was shown to be wrong. Away from Ferrari and Red Bull, the Germans have only added three podium finishes, all of them thanks to mistakes or failures by the leaders, so, under normal conditions, they would never have popped the champagne this year.
However, in Spain they came to fight for victory with George Russell after Charles Leclerc retired and Carlos Sainz and Max Verstappen ran off the track at turn 4.
After seeing that they had taken a step forward in Barcelona, the Silver Arrows thought they could repeat performance in Monaco, but the slow urban layout showed the weaknesses of the W13.
A car unable to enter its front end in tight corners caused the height of the rear to rise, something that led to suffering more with the potholes and the hard suspensions of these 2022 Formula 1 cars.
In the Principality they could barely get past fifth and eighth place, returning to a place they thought they had escaped from. In the usual explanation of the race by Mercedes engineering director Andrew Shovlin , in a video uploaded to the team’s YouTube channel, they revealed the reasons why they lost performance.
“It was much more difficult to get the car running in Monaco than it was in Barcelona,” said the Briton. “In Spain we had shown that we had good race pace, although we know there is still work to do to close the gap with Red Bull and Ferrari.”
“The challenge with Monaco is the low speed characteristics, it’s a very bumpy circuit and we were struggling with the handling of the car. That affected the drivers’ confidence to pick up speed and meant we couldn’t run as close to the limit as we had been. able to do in Spain”, he continued.
Although the Monegasque track was not the best so far this year for the Germans, they are aware that they can turn it around , although they admit that they are “desperate” to do so.
“Baku could present some similar challenges, we are working on areas to try to improve porpoising ,” Shovlin said. “Trying to be able to run the car a bit closer to its ideal window, but we are very aware that as well as adding base performance, we need to make it work on a wider range of circuits.”
“So we will be working on all this during the next week to prepare Azerbaijan, but also in the long term, because there will be other difficult tracks,” said the engineer.
“All of this is being done with very hard work, because the team and the drivers are desperate to get back to the front,” said the member of the team with the best streak of constructors’ world titles in the history of Formula 1.
