At Mercedes they hope that the lag in performance, highlighted in Sakhir’s weekend, is mainly due to less knowledge of his car compared to Red Bull and, above all, Ferrari.
There is no doubt that during the six days of pre-season testing the team’s engineers worked on a more stable basis than their direct rivals, without presenting significant updates ahead of the first race, which allowed them to learn more about the behavior of the car.
Mercedes , meanwhile, only fielded the final version of the W13 in Bahrain, a delay that might have been considered insignificant had the car performed well from the opening laps, but it didn’t.
The Bahrain tests allowed Ferrari to work on the details of the car, making changes to the flat bottom to find the right compromise between porpoising and performance. Meanwhile, in the Mercedes box they were busy with paper and pencil, necessary to write down all the initial problems of the W13, some expected and others not.
Everything lasted until the weekend of the race, and the stopwatch certified these differences. It is not small: nine tenths per lap compared to Charles Leclerc’s Ferrari and more than seven against Max Verstappen ‘s Red Bull . This margin was only reduced to zero when the safety car came out onto the track and forced the drivers to huddle together.
The Mercedes engineers are now wondering what can be solved in a relatively short period of time, that is, during the Jeddah and Melbourne weekends. The other big question is how much can be recovered through development, and here the calendar already indicates a deadline between Imola and Barcelona.
In Mercedes they hope that part of the gap with the rest of the leading teams can be compensated by analyzing Sakhir’s results, as well as making some corrections in the configuration.
To eliminate the problem of porpoising, the two W13s that were put on the Bahrain track were set up in a “safe” way, but this meant sacrificing a lot of performance. The result is that the aerodynamics currently work in a non-linear way, as confirmed by Sakhir’s data, showing excellent behavior in some corners and less than optimal in others.
“Our car has more potential than we’ve seen so far,” confessed a Mercedes engineer, “but we still have to figure out how to get the full performance, because the porpoising problem doesn’t allow us to do that at the moment.”
Part of the gap that Mercedes is facing is related to porpoising, and it cannot be ruled out that there will be some modifications to the flat bottom of the W13 for the race to be held in Saudi Arabia.
It is not only the Mercedes garage that has to live with this balance, all the teams are aware that they can find more performance by lowering the height of their single-seaters, but for now there are those who have managed to find a better compromise than their rivals, an aspect that has drawn the first ranking order of the season.
However, confidence in the W13 project remains total. At Mercedes they believe in the downforce data that is seen in the simulations, but at the moment they do not know the car well enough to control said downforce in an ideal way. And, somewhat surprisingly, the power unit is also trusted, despite the data collected in the first race of the season.
The current constructors’ world champions do not believe that at this time there are significant differences between the different engines, but rather a situation of general equilibrium that would put Ferrari on a level with Honda and Mercedes itself.
It will take more race weekends and different circuits to get a clear picture, but at the moment there are no alarms about the performance of the power unit. Sakhir’s results have, for better or worse, according to Mercedes, little to do with engine power.
