No silver bullet

‘We got it wrong last year,’ said Toto Wolff after qualifying in Bahrain. ‘We thought we could fix it by sticking to this concept of car and it didn’t work out. We just need to switch our focus onto what we believe can be the right direction.’

Mercedes had always been adamant the narrow sidepods were not the problem. As technical director Mike Elliott explained late last year, Mercedes believed they did not lead to the difficulties with porpoising and bouncing: ‘Although the sidepod is visually quite different to what others are running, when you look at what it does aerodynamically it’s not so different to what others are running. It’s just a different geometry. And the reality is that if you were to swap sidepod concept, I don’t think it makes a very big difference to where we’re at.’

It would be easy to scoff at this, but it’s not incompatible with the current situation. The narrow sidepods didn’t cause the problems of last year, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t at the heart of a very different trouble this year. It’s possible that when it comes to the run-of-the-mill development cycle of gradually eking more downforce out of your car, the sidepods are a limitation. As Wolff said after the race, ‘this is not a matter of finding 0.3sec and polishing the car up, this is a matter of serious performance.’

This is why Wolff has talked of ‘embarking on untreaded paths’ and the need for ‘a change of perspective’ technically. The team has already confirmed there will be an upgrade package introduced at Imola, the sixth event of the season in May, that will be visually different. But Elliott has indicated it won’t be a switch to the Red Bull style favoured by seven out of 10 teams featuring pronounced downwash ramps at the rear of the sidepods and aggressive undercuts. It is likely to be, at best, a small nudge in a new direction.

There has also been talk of former Chief Technical Officer James Allison being parachuted in to take control and fix the problem, but although he will have a part to play, that was always the case given the ongoing remit in his current job, which is the same position but spread across the F1 team, Mercedes-AMG F1 Applied Science and the Ineos Britannia America’s Cup project. Just as the fault for the situation won’t lie with one individual in a design team of hundreds, nor will the solution.

While Mercedes didn’t admit the depth of its troubles until the Bahrain Grand Prix weekend, it has known for some time that its numbers weren’t going to cut it up against Red Bull, Ferrari and even Aston Martin. And it is this that shines the brightest light on the team’s biggest problem: there was no mystery correlation issue that sent it in the wrong direction; the car was exactly as expected and it hit all the performance targets set for it. What went wrong was that they were the wrong targets, because Mercedes is missing something significant when it comes to identifying the full performance potential under these regulations.

It’s not as if it hasn’t trialled a more conventional design. Mercedes tested Red Bull-style sidepods both in the wind tunnel and with CFD and found no advantage. Equally, rivals have tried out the narrow sidepod concept and not found it to be the most fruitful avenue to pursue. Simply following the herd won’t work for Mercedes if it doesn’t get to the heart of why the current car has missed the mark, raising questions about where the root cause of the problem lies amid its vast array of simulation and design tools.

It’s also essential to note that while the sidepod shape is most visible, it’s not the heart of the concept. The most powerful downforce generator of these cars is the underfloor and the ground effect venturi tunnels that compress and expand the airflow. While the mechanism for doing this is well understood and was used in F1 cars in the late 1970s and early ’80s before the flat-bottom regulations banned it in 1983, there are subtleties to be understood in the way you achieve this.

An F1 car is a bafflingly complex array of interacting airflows, and underfloor performance is intrinsically connected to the rest of the car. That includes the way the airflow is conditioned by the aero devices at the front end of the car (including the suspension members), the floor fences at the leading edge of the underfloor, the complex floor edges down the side of the car and the sidepod airflows. And that’s a very simplified version of a hugely complex airflow regime. It would be satisfying to make massive visual changes and transform the car, but it has to be based on science.

There are also significant limitations at play in making such changes. F1’s cost cap is set at a baseline of $135m, which broadly speaking covers the design, development and operation of the two cars across the season. There is a vast list of exemptions, including driver pay, as well as upward adjustments because of inflation and the composition of the calendar, but it’s no longer possible to brute-force spend your way out of trouble. That means any change in concept Mercedes adopts this year will be limited by the architecture of its car.

While it’s not impossible Mercedes could turn this round in time to fight for the 2023 World Championship, the chances of this happening appear vanishingly small. Both Wolff and Russell have hinted changes might have to be made more with an eye on 2024-25, which commits Mercedes to another year of trying to make the best of it and maybe nick the odd win later in the year. Hamilton, meanwhile, has questioned the fact that his feedback about what the car needed wasn’t taken seriously.

‘Last year, there were things I told them, I said the issues that are with the car,’ he said. ‘I’ve driven so many cars in my life, I know what a car needs, I know what a car doesn’t need. And I think it’s really about accountability. It’s about owning up and saying, “Yeah, you know what, we didn’t listen to you, it’s not where it needs to be,” and we’ve got to work, we’ve got to look into the balance through the corners, look at all the weak points and just huddle up as a team. That’s what we do.’

It’s not necessarily a case of Mercedes not being willing to fix those troubles, but not being able to. Downforce is your best friend when it comes to F1 car design as not only does it make a car quicker, provided it is consistently produced across a range of car attitudes, but it also helps with tyre management and therefore race pace.

For Mercedes to correct its course, it must get to the bottom of why it has failed to see the greater potential of a different direction with its car and ensure it settles on the right modification to its concept. If it fails to do so, it might not just be 2023 that’s a write-off as far as a championship challenge is concerned, but next year as well.