lh13 wrote: ↑13 Jun 2022, 06:01
So basically Mercedes' own fault.... how bad the car must be for this to be the case.
While it's every team's fault if they --- up the design, you are also taking about the team that came in with a solid result today, well better than Ferrari I might add. No that wasn't from pace although there have been moments. The Merc is currently, as they are running it, above mid-field, but not at the level of RBR/Ferrari, clearly. The Merc does appear to have equal amounts of engineering talent and resources invested as we would expect from any of the 3 top teams.
It's been mentioned that this ride height / bouncing issue was identified in 2021. There were talks amount mandating a minimum ride height, specifically because some teams saw this in the simulations and wanted to avoid having to deal with it. This is a cost-cap era now and if things are supposed to be cheaper, you can't create new problems that will require highly complex solutions and expect that to not lead back to the same point we came from.
All the teams by next year will know how to run these floors in a way that lessens the bouncing and still preserves or even increases the downforce, but that's going to be at the expensive of stupid amounts of the resources trying to bend rules to solve an artificial problem. It's not making things any easier.
I think some people are quick to dismiss the amount of stress this is putting on the Merc drivers in particular. Mercedes can either bounce their drivers to death or go slow, apparently that's the choice right now. As another mentioned, the solution at this point is likely to be an entire floor, but that resource investment starts to be balanced against learning opportunities this year, which must not be overlooked, and fresh design for next year. In this way Mercedes needs to evolve parts of the current car in ways that can help them understand the dynamics they currently are struggling with. The zero pod concept is not definitely the issue; it's not clear if it's actually related or not. Likely the down/out wash from the ramps/under-cuts on the wider cars help seal the sides of the floor but honestly I'm not sure if that's as important as it once was. Based on what appear to be modular tunnels in the Merc floor, they are probably able to test different shapes as inserts into the tunnels. Ideally this could be track-specific or package-specific.