2022 Mercedes-AMG | Petronas F1 Team

[zibby43]

Most pessimistic I’ve ever heard Toto.

“If you look at the pecking order today it seems like a very long shot to even think about being in contention for any of the championships.”

[Morteza]

By the way, all that fluorescent yellow on Hamilton’s car; big Rossi vibes!

I really like that, actually
Mercedes cars are usually very bland when it comes to colors, so this is a very nice change.

[zibby43]

We knew we weren't quick enough coming into the weekend so our goal for this weekend was one of damage limitation in the championship. In terms of pace we're more or less on our own; we couldn't realistically put any pressure on Red Bull and Ferrari, and we weren't really under any pressure from behind. This allowed us to play a bit with the strategy, moving quite early to a three stop with Lewis. Our priority has to be to get on top of our current performance issues; we don’t have a car to fight for pole or race wins and that isn't something that we can tolerate for long if we ambitions to win the championships. The balance was quite tricky but the main issue is just a lack of grip, caused by the fact that we have to run the car so high to avoid the bottoming. However, the weekend hasn't been without it's positives. The gaps are pretty big but we can see so much performance that we can bring relatively quickly, the team has also worked well and the car has been reliable. We have a lot of ideas to explore to improve our pace and we'll be working hard over the next few days and weeks to bring those to the track.”

- Andrew Shovlin

[Bill_Kar]

It wasn't that bad today and Mercedes bought some time with RB imploding. But I think it will be a long time until they sort out their problems and the gap is quite big.

I guess rear tyres along with straight line speed are the main problems? That's what I'm inferring from Wolff and Hamilton.

[dans79]

It wasn't that bad today and Mercedes bought some time with RB imploding. But I think it will be a long time until they sort out their problems and the gap is quite big.

I guess rear tyres along with straight line speed are the main problems? That's what I'm inferring from Wolff and Hamilton.

My educated guess is that in order to deal with the proposing they raised the ride height. That means less downforce from the floor, and less aero stability from the diffser area. To compensate for that, they cranked up the front and rear wings to generate "dirty" downforce. The dirty down force comes with a heavy drag penalty. To try an minimize that, they tweaked the mappings to deploy more power in the tractions zone, and that lead to being more abusive on the tires.

It will be interesting to see how they do next weakened, specially if the track is still as smooth as it was last year!

[Bill_Kar]

It wasn't that bad today and Mercedes bought some time with RB imploding. But I think it will be a long time until they sort out their problems and the gap is quite big.

I guess rear tyres along with straight line speed are the main problems? That's what I'm inferring from Wolff and Hamilton.

My educated guess is that in order to deal with the proposing they raised the ride height. That means less downforce from the floor, and less aero stability from the diffser area. To compensate for that, they cranked up the front and rear wings to generate "dirty" downforce. The dirty down force comes with a heavy drag penalty. To try an minimize that, they tweaked the mappings to deploy more power in the tractions zone, and that lead to being more abusive on the tires.

It will be interesting to see how they do next weakened, specially if the track is still as smooth as it was last year!

Thank you! So the total lack of straight line speed, it's probably more down to drag rather than PU.

Also, I like the idea that the "biggest" problems are interrelated. I don't truly believe that fundamentally W13 is such a bad car per se.

[Hoffman900]

It wasn't that bad today and Mercedes bought some time with RB imploding. But I think it will be a long time until they sort out their problems and the gap is quite big.

I guess rear tyres along with straight line speed are the main problems? That's what I'm inferring from Wolff and Hamilton.

My educated guess is that in order to deal with the proposing they raised the ride height. That means less downforce from the floor, and less aero stability from the diffser area. To compensate for that, they cranked up the front and rear wings to generate "dirty" downforce. The dirty down force comes with a heavy drag penalty. To try an minimize that, they tweaked the mappings to deploy more power in the tractions zone, and that lead to being more abusive on the tires.

It will be interesting to see how they do next weakened, specially if the track is still as smooth as it was last year!

This.

Take Lewis’s comments about lack of rear downforce and Toto’s comments about running a lot more wing, and I came to the same conclusion. They raised the car to stop porpoising and compensated some with more wing angle.

Add in the fact I don’t think the other Merc powered teams have strong chassis / aero concepts at the moment, and I think they mostly had the engines turned down. Merc themselves only needed them to run as strong to run a relatively uncontested 5th-6th until the yellow flag. They looked more than happy doing a tire test up until then.

It is to be seem how long the Ferrari and Honda units can stay strong. Merc might be playing the long game thinking they’ll have a stronger chassis at the end of the season and be able to crank the engines up some where RB and Ferrari, if they are battling hard all year, will be turning them down or taking grid penalties.

[Jolle]

It wasn't that bad today and Mercedes bought some time with RB imploding. But I think it will be a long time until they sort out their problems and the gap is quite big.

I guess rear tyres along with straight line speed are the main problems? That's what I'm inferring from Wolff and Hamilton.

My educated guess is that in order to deal with the proposing they raised the ride height. That means less downforce from the floor, and less aero stability from the diffser area. To compensate for that, they cranked up the front and rear wings to generate "dirty" downforce. The dirty down force comes with a heavy drag penalty. To try an minimize that, they tweaked the mappings to deploy more power in the tractions zone, and that lead to being more abusive on the tires.

It will be interesting to see how they do next weakened, specially if the track is still as smooth as it was last year!

Thank you! So the total lack of straight line speed, it's probably more down to drag rather than PU.

Also, I like the idea that the "biggest" problems are interrelated. I don't truly believe that fundamentally W13 is such a bad car per se.

Plus, stiffer (rear) suspension, which hurts grip out of corners.

It was quite scary to see how much Hamilton initially was skating on the hards, before he got them up to temperature.

[dans79]

Also, I like the idea that the "biggest" problems are interrelated.

At this level of engineering and sophistication everything is interrelated. I've always thought of it as a function with hundreds of inputs. The result of the function is lap time, and you alter all the variables to get the best lap time.

[Just_a_fan]

Also, I like the idea that the "biggest" problems are interrelated.

At this level of engineering and sophistication everything is interrelated. I've always thought of it as a function with hundreds of inputs. The result of the function is lap time, and you alter all the variables to get the best lap time.

And there is also the very big variable - to score points, you have to finish.

Oh, how I chuckled quietly in to my pint...

[AtlasZX]

They will have the bouncing issue sorted out very soon with a new floor, probably they will be like 3rd fastest car for a while and they will bring a W13B (or "C", whatever) by mid season and probably challenge for victories in the second half of the season.
Right now, looks like they don't understand the car yet, and the car itself looks horrible to drive with a competitive setup, the Merc P.U. probably is at least comparable with the "top 2 teams" ones, but the 4 cars that use it make it looks underpowered.

[e30ernest]

I'm watching the performance between Lewis and George here. Lewis got this round over George. I wonder if this will be the norm moving forward. If it is, then it is a surprise since I thought that George would at least be on the level of Bottas in terms of qualifying (meaning really close to Lewis).

With that, I am also looking at Albon and how he compares to Latiffi. This will give a good overall picture on how George actually performs (since we will have 2 known entities to compare to: Lewis and Albon).

[PlatinumZealot]

George is 24 and Lewis is 37... Quite a big gap in age. George should be getting faster and Lewis should be getting slower so it should not be long before the qualifyings start to favour George. If that doesnt happen then you can say that George wasn't all that fast over a lap, it was just that Latiffi is dead slow.

[axle]

GR63 nearly won his first race for Merc when Lewis had covid...his teammate was Bottas, who he had soundly beaten before cruel fate intervened.

There is nothing speed wise about George that a fixed W13 can't resolve.

[Just_a_fan]

I'm watching the performance between Lewis and George here. Lewis got this round over George. I wonder if this will be the norm moving forward. If it is, then it is a surprise since I thought that George would at least be on the level of Bottas in terms of qualifying (meaning really close to Lewis).

With that, I am also looking at Albon and how he compares to Latiffi. This will give a good overall picture on how George actually performs (since we will have 2 known entities to compare to: Lewis and Albon).

George messed up his second Q3 lap which put him down in 9th. He'd been doing similar times to Lewis otherwise. Once in the race, he quickly got up to 6th and then ran around about 6 seconds behind Lewis. The Mercs were slower than the top 4, quicker than those behind them, no point having an off through in-fighting between drivers. George forfeited a chance to finish ahead when he dropped it in qualifying.