Mercedes has had many quiet winters in the past and then came to the first race and swept away its rivals.
Even in 2021, when Mercedes seemed to be totally on the tightrope of not being able to do much in testing, they managed to overtake Red Bull and win the first race of the season.
But despite skepticism that the German outfit is hiding its true pace, and fears that it may find something in its factory this week to unlock what it needs to be further up front, the team looks set to enter the season with a problems.
That feeling is what has led Lewis Hamilton to declare that, with the car as it is now, it will not be in a position to win races.
Last year, Mercedes couldn’t find the right setup with the W12 in testing, and this time around, the drivers and the team itself are having a hard time finding speed.
The car is suffering from the famous porpoising much worse than its main rivals, Red Bull and Ferrari, and Mercedes has not yet found a way to solve the problem.
This difficulty is not only found when the car accelerates on the straights, because the car suffers when it bottoms out in some corners when it is at the limit, which indicates that things are not going well when it comes to achieving good downforce. .
As its new driver, George Russell , put it: “There’s a lot of potential in the W13, and I think our engineers are going to get it, we just have to find a way to unlock our performance.”
“The porpoising is affecting our ability to get the car into the correct operating window, and the team is working hard to find solutions. This is a long season and I think our speed is there, we just have to find it.” British.
If Mercedes raises the ride height to prevent it from bottoming out, it will be able to get the most out of the W13, but that will come at the sacrifice of downforce and some lap time.
The team is faced with a small dilemma, since the more downforce it adds to the car -as in the Bahrain test update-, the more it pushes the car down, the greater the porpoising , and it will not improve over time for lap.
As a stopgap solution, Mercedes could reduce the load to reduce the car’s downforce on the W13 when going at high speeds.
The team focused heavily on experimenting with suspension settings and ride heights to try and find the answer, before opting at the end of the test to cut out some of their floor and raise the rear of the car a bit in the hope of let that help.
The engineering manager, Andrew Shovlin , suggested that the team had gotten some positive results from their last-minute experiments.
“We’ve made some progress with the porpoising effect, which in turn has made the car less difficult to drive, and we also feel like we’ve made a step in the right direction with the set-up. There’s still a lot more to come.” ahead if we manage to improve in this aspect”, he commented.
But the problem is not only porpoising, and the weight of the car has become another difficulty for the teams this year as few are within the minimum weight limit. The differences on the grid are speculated to be quite large, with Alfa Romeo understood to be the lightest car.
In F1, typically 10kg of weight equates to 0.3 seconds lap time, so any difference in mass of a few kilos could play a huge role in performance.
However, despite the difficulties Mercedes find themselves in at the moment, the reality of their situation is not that they are stuck with an uncompetitive car and have no chance to catch up.
They know that the W13 shows promise and has the downforce to take on the best at the front of the grid. They just have to find a way to unleash their strengths and be able to roll without being compromised by porpoising .
As Hamilton was very clear at the end of the test: “There is a potential within our car that we can achieve it. We just have to be able to extract it and solve some of the setbacks, which is what we are working on.”
