The German outfit has been severely handicapped so far this season by porpoising , forcing the structure to set up its W13 at a taller height compared to what it was originally designed for.
Raising the bottom of the car is taking a lot of the car’s downforce off, but the team remains convinced that if they can get rid of the porpoise then they can unlock a lot more performance.
The team has worked hard in recent weeks to get to the bottom of the problem, and now they hope to track these developments in Miami, in order to find out if they have really started to solve the problem or not.
Mercedes engineering director Andrew Shovlin said the updates would not instantly solve all the car’s problems, but would at least confirm whether it was headed in the right direction.
Analyzing the Imola race, Shovlin said: “We know where we are at the moment, we know the gap we need to cut to get to where we want to be, but as a team we are very focused on the engineering challenge ahead of us, which is very interesting”.
“These are new problems for us, now we have to overcome them and understand them. Day by day I think we are moving forward, we are learning more about it and hopefully soon, maybe in Miami, we can put some of the new parts on the car and, Hopefully, it will give us an indication of whether we are moving in the right direction.”
“We don’t expect to solve this problem overnight. But if we can get a hint that we’re going in the right direction, that we really get to the bottom of what’s going on, then we’ll be very happy.”
Team principal Toto Wolff said during the Imola weekend that the team just had to find a way to “unlock” the potential behind the W13 .
“I think we have a direction mapped out where we know how we can unlock that potential, something that would bring us much closer together. But at the moment, we don’t have the key.”
“And so we just need to keep working and continue to trust science and physics before we fall into some sort of negative inertia.”
When asked to explain more about Wolff’s comments, Shovlin was very clear: “Obviously it’s a cliché, but the only reality is that right now we can’t work on the car as we designed it.”
“We have to work with a higher ride height and by having that setup we lose a lot of our performance. Although that could also be the case for almost every car on the grid at the moment as there are so many of us with this problem.”
“A lot of the work that has been done at Brackley has been to understand the phenomenon and if we can control it, if we can get it out of the car, and when Toto talks about finding the key, what he really means is; is there a solution? aerodynamics we can put on the car that will make this problem go away?
“Now, realistically, we think this is going to be something we’ll tackle step by step, rather than make one big move where it’s all over, but we’re seeing positive signs. As I said, we hope to bring parts for the car as soon as possible. we can, maybe even get to Miami, where we think we can start to see progress on that,” Shovlin concluded.
