pursue_one's wrote: ↑12 Jan 2023, 22:41https://www.auto-motor-und-sport.de/for ... interview/
When did you have to sign off on the first major components of the 2023 car?
Elliott: The chassis and the larger parts of the car were approved in mid-October. The fairing much later. The devil is in the details. We're building the aerodynamics around the rough framework of the car.
Did the bouncing come as a surprise to you?
Elliott: We knew that the Groundeffect cars of the past had this phenomenon, and we also talked about it in the design phase. We didn't expect there to be any problems at all, however, none of the simulations suggested how severe the problem would be. I think everyone has had that experience. It's very difficult to recreate the problem in the wind tunnel, and in CFD simulation it would be very expensive to create a computational model for it. That's why we didn't use the resources allowed by the regulations in CFD to simulate the bouncing.
How much development time did bouncing cost you?
Elliott: Normally, you identify your car's problems during winter testing and try to solve them by the first race. This time was different. Red Bull probably solved the problem the quickest. They found a solution at the end of testing. Others thought they had solved it, and then it came back. In our case, it was so dominant that we couldn't take care of different areas of the car at all.Normally, you're trying to not only find downforce, but also give your car a characteristic through the corners so the drivers can balance it how they want. That work is usually done during winter testing. That's when you work on setups. We had to postpone that. And once we solved the bouncing, we suddenly found there were other problems we had to solve.
In 2023, will you focus more on a larger working window than on maximum downforce?
Elliott: Our goals will be different than they were in 2022. Some of the problems stemmed from what aerodynamic goals we had set. We've already made changes, and there will be more. We hope that's enough to get us back to the front in 2023.
What were the other hidden problems?
Elliott: If I revealed them now, the competition would know too well about the solutions we found. The simplest answer is this: The car we gave our drivers is not the car we wanted. Drivers reported that it was difficult to drive. And we now know why.
Like many cars at the start of the season, the Mercedes was heavily overweight. What role did that play in the balance?
Elliott: If we're honest with ourselves, we didn't deliver what we wanted. Weight wasn't our biggest problem. Everyone knows how much lap time you find when your car gets lighter. We can always solve this problem, at the latest over this winter. It was much more important to understand the other problems. If we didn't do that, we would experience the same thing next season.
interview at the end of the 2022 season.
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He seems too positive , either W14 is a rocketship or another W13