After four grand prix, it seems that Mercedes is running out of patience with the W13 and the Spanish GP is already set as the limit. Miami and then Barcelona will pass judgment on the current Silver Arrows single-seater.
The Imola weekend further deepened the state of crisis for the Brackley team with both drivers outside the top 10 for almost the entire weekend (except for George Russell in the race), and very bad feelings especially in the garage at Lewis Hamilton.
The Briton was fighting during the three days with Aston Martin and AlphaTauri, far from what was originally the objective, something that discourages a team used to winning for eight years and that suddenly seems to be completely lost.
The tendency in these first races has been to put all the blame on the negative effects of porpoising , but it seems more and more evident that there are other problems that directly influence the poor performance of the Mercedes W13.
To date, from the structure of the star they have repeated on several occasions that the car has a lot of potential to discover, but as the races go on, they seem to have more problems instead of reducing them.
During the Emilia Romagna GP, Lewis Hamilton, who is usually a team driver, said bluntly that “there is no light at the end of the tunnel. The rest of the year will be the same”.
However, German team principal Toto Wolff is less drastic: “We don’t have the key to unlocking the potential that lies within the car and that would surely bring us much closer to what our rivals should be.”
“I think everything good and bad is related to the background. We have studied several interesting ideas and concepts that we are testing and exploring: we will see if they pay off in the next races.”
“I would say that the concept in itself is not bad, but there is something that simply does not work with the new regulations. It is not necessary to throw everything away, but we do have to put in some remedies to limit the damage,” he added.
Although the words coming out of Brackley are still relatively optimistic, it seems that patience is reaching its limit: if the problems are not identified and resolved before the Spanish GP in Barcelona, Mercedes could abandon the 2022 project for focus entirely on the 2023 car.
