“It’s our final step of aero development,” Mercedes confirm about bringing final upgrade to W13 at the United States GP
Mercedes
The Brackley-based Mercedes team, ahead of the United States Grand Prix has confirmed that they are planning on introducing their last upgrade of the 2022 F1 season at Austin.
Mercedes has brought a barrage of upgrades to its 2022 car throughout the season and while some of them have worked, most of the upgrades haven’t worked as the team intended them to do.
As a result of not being able to get on top of the gremlins of their car, the team after 17 rounds, is stuck in no man’s land in the third position in the Constructors Championship.
Ferrari and Red Bull have made a step forward as compared to last season, whereas the Silver Arrows have found it difficult to cope with the new regulations and have slipped backward.
The team has had to deal with one or the other problem on every Grand Prix weekend, and this is one of the reasons why Lewis Hamilton and George Russell haven’t been able to score any race victories in the current campaign.
However, there are still four races left in the season, and Mercedes Trackside Engineering Director, Andrew Shovlin has revealed that they are going to bring their last upgrade of the season to Austin.
While stressing about it, Shovlin said, “It’s our final step of aero development and that’ll hopefully give us a bit more performance, but importantly with every step we’re learning more and more and that learning we can carry into next year.”
“That’s part of it. Also, there are a few bits where we have taken some weight out of components that will hopefully get the car closer to the weight limit.”
“It’s very difficult for us to predict where we’re going to be. In Singapore Lewis was awfully close to pole position, yet in Suzuka, both cars had a big gap to the front.”
“Now our race pace has been reasonably strong so if we can make a step hopefully we can get into the fight with the Ferraris and the Red Bulls.”
“But qualifying for us is the really difficult one to predict at the moment.”
“But as I said, a lot of it is about learning and we’re certainly going to give it our best shot in the final four races.”
Mercedes lost out to Red Bull during last year’s United States GP and Shovlin feels that the disappointment was down to overheating issues that Lewis Hamilton faced on the soft tires.
While talking about the same, Shovlin further added, “They’ve done some resurfacing, so hopefully those issues with the bumps are a bit less, but what’s very hard this year is to really know where are you going to be on a circuit before you’ve gone there.”
“A lot of it is about learning but we’re not going to make any predictions about how we’re going to perform. We just need to go there on Friday, see what kind of issues we have and see whether we can solve those with set-up.”
Mercedes on Lewis Hamilton’s struggles against Esteban Ocon at the Japanese GP
The recently concluded Japanese GP was run under wet conditions where Alpine’s Esteban Ocon was able to frustrate Lewis Hamiton throughout the race. The Brit was stuck staring at the tail light of the Frenchman’s car, and despite his best efforts, was not able to overtake him.
After the race, Mercedes admitted that they went the wrong way on car setup and that cost them dearly during the chaotic Japanese GP.
Moreover, Russell and Hamilton were at the bottom of the speed trap figures during qualifying and Nicholas Latifi was the fastest who was driving a Mercedes-powered Williams car.
Russell during his post-race interview admitted that Suzuka exposed a weakness of the car, and Hamilton while talking about his struggles against Ocon said, “I tried everything.”
“Unfortunately we’re just incredibly slow this weekend. We were the slowest out of everyone, I think, on the straight. As soon as you pull out of the tow, I was just going nowhere.”
Andrew Shovlin has revealed that Mercedes went for more downforce on their car in Japan as they banked on the race being run under wet conditions.
“Part of that decision is that it was actually giving us our best lap times in the race condition where we were going to get high degradation in the dry.”
“But we’d also seen this rain that was coming in on Sunday, and we felt that in a wet race that might be a benefit.”
“Now, as it happened, the DRS was never enabled, which meant overtaking was very, very hard.”
“Perhaps the right decision would have been to bias to a lower downforce setting, but fundamentally one of the things we need to improve on the car for next year is to get the car to have more downforce at the lower drag levels and then we can race those lighter wings and still be competitive in the corners.”
The Japanese GP is in the past, and what’s ahead is the United States GP where the Silver Arrows are going to try their best to get a positive result for the team, and they ideally would be eyeing a podium finish with at least one its cars.
There are four races left in the season, and considering how up and down 2022 has been for Mercedes, how many podiums can you see them scoring in the remaining races?
Also Read: Who holds the record for the most number of wins at the United States Grand Prix?
Rishabh Negi
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