KeiKo403 wrote: ↑02 Mar 2023, 15:57
stonehenge wrote: ↑02 Mar 2023, 15:42
icantride wrote: ↑02 Mar 2023, 15:08
George's car on the right looks to be fitted with the original RW. Likely they'll do tests in FP1 with both drivers and make a decision for the rest of the weekend
There are ample reasons to run both wings for comparisons in FP1, I wouldn't take it as an indication of them still considering which wing to run. Mike Elliott was pretty clear that they're gonna run a different wing than testing.
That being said, hypothetically, if they are considering running such a high df wing in Bahrain, it would probably not bode well for their concept (especially the floor). So, let's wait and see, but I'm pretty sure they're running both wings just for data and aren't actually considering using it because that would be...well, not great.
Unless conditions are significantly different than last Saturday (or other stuff on the car has changed) then why run both wings between George and Lewis in FP1? That isn’t a direct question to you as such, just a thinking out load kinda moment. Surely that have the relevant data on the barn door from 5 days ago
I obviously could be very wrong here, but what I've gathered from the things Mike Elliott said and other unnamed personnel at Mercedes is that they really weren't trying to optimize the setup for Bahrain during testing. They were mainly just trying to understand the car. A popular theory for why they ran such a high df rear wing is that they wanted to see if it would trigger porpoising, and I'm inclined to believe that was at least part of the reasoning.
You always want to isolate variables as you change more and more things about the setup so you know what is causing a certain effect. If we recall from last year, Mercedes' biggest problem was that they just didn't understand why thing were happening. It makes a lot of sense to me that as you start trying to optimize the setup for Bahrain and try to get the floor to produce the downforce it needs to, you'd want to isolate the variable of the rear wing if you can.
Lastly, Mark Hughes had an interesting observation on The Race's podcast this week. He said that Mercedes' third day of testing looked a lot like other teams' first. In other words, partly because of the struggles they had on the second day, they are still on a pretty steep learning curve, if that makes sense. I think that might be another reason for Mercedes to run the high df rear wing on a car during fp1--they didn't really get to do their full testing program so they have some catching up to do.