Just_a_fan wrote: ↑13 Jul 2022, 16:06If Mercedes end the season with a car that is capable of winning on merit, then changing to someone else's concept would be rather silly.
While at one point it looked like suspension and/or maybe tyre management is their biggest problem in the first 5-6 races, taking a look at things after 11 races and seeing the same pace deficit most of the time gives a different perspective. If at one point the team claimed they couldn't understand the car and set it up properly, this wasn't mentioned for a while, but the deficit is there. The only place Merc seemed closer on pace was Silverstone and it was more coming from Hamilton being fast and Sainz being slow and slowing Leclerc who was already hurt by FW damage. Changing the floor from Barcelona helped with bouncing, but this did very little to remove the lap-time deficit.
From aero perspective alone, there are two clear disadvantages of their concept:
- higher drag, shown in pre-season via CFD, confirmed in first few races by the team and demonstrated in every race since, where they used less RW (so to offset drag they lose downforce) than RB and Ferrari just to come close to their top speed; this higher drag comes from mid-wing and rear tyre drag
- incapability to induce strong floor sealing vortex due to having elongated inlets, which take away some of the air RB, Ferrari and other teams use for floor sealing; I've mentioned this several times on different topics and Gary A also mentioned this a couple of weeks later; this can be offset with lower ride-height, but this leave the car vulnerable to bouncing and sudden downforce loss with bumps on the track.
Advantage is introducing more air for the beam wing and diffuser with mid wing, but both RB and Ferrari are doing the same job with their wide designs. In fact, Ferrari has by far the slimmest rear end, as their sidepods taper inwards and engine cover is the slimmest in the field. In wind tunnel, W13 might be the fastest car, but the WT model is still just a model and it can't reflect the actual car 100%. With these rules, this showed with very different model floor stiffness compared to actual floor stiffness.
From this perspective, Merc design has a clear disadvantage with such a big exposed surface. This low stiffness, coupled with potentially smaller ride-height operating window (potential suspension problem, but definitely not as big as it seemed early in the season), leaves the car set-up options compromised. Low stiffness reflects on bouncing sensitivity by providing unstable and unpredictable floor sealing and sudden gain and loss of extra downforce. If bouncing is sorted, bumps on track and roll while cornering affect the predictability of downforce, as floor deflection and vibration increase and decrease it. I'm still not convinced Hamilton and Russell crashed in Austria Q because they pushed too far and not because of mid-corner downforce lost.
To take care of this, the only sensible solution are rod stays, since cable stays don't prevent upward deflection (i.e. floor edges are still prone to vibrations, just limited in downward direction). Rod stays are a big drag penalty, unless concealed within sidepod bodywork, which is what RB was doing from day 1. Somehow Ferrari manages things with cable stays alone, but their floor is significantly less exposed in the critical area (ahead of rear wheel) then Merc. And with wide bodywork, you can fit as many stays as you want, which can also reduce floor weight while increasing stiffness.
Zero pods would have been a clear conceptual winner in 2021, all teams were going towards it and Mercedes has been working towards it for a long time. With new rules, top two cars are completely different than their predecessors. This is not a coincidence. This does not mean Merc couldn't somehow regroup and extract 100% of that concept potential, while RB and Ferrari get stuck at 95%, making it a better car overall. But can anyone really see this happening, especially from methodical RB with their mighty Honda engine and taking budget cap into account.
