Mercedes break silence on their plan to err on the safe side with W14 after terrible porpoising trouble in 2022
Mercedes focused on not repeating the same 2022 technical mistakes in the 2024 car
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Mercedes AMG Petronas engineer, James Allison accepts that the W14 car had a lot of technical issues. In hopes of making a faster and better car they had trodden down a completely opposite path that gave rise to a lot of issues that have considerably affected Mercedes’s position in the sport.
In 2022, the FIA made certain regulations which saw the re-return of ground effect cars. Ground effect cars are an assortment of variables that have been deployed to generate downforce in automotive aerodynamics, especially in racing cars. However, backfiring from the original reason of introducing these cars, that is, to make the races more interesting, the cars started bouncing and made it much difficult to operate.
When a lot of teams started complaining about the porposing issues faced, halfway across the season, the FIA altered the floor height, which did provide a little scope of improvement but there still hasn’t been any significant improvement.
James Allison in a recent interview has said, “Over the winter, we faced a choice, Go aggressive and trade the bouncing protection in the rule change for performance, or take a more cautious route and steer clear of the sort of porpoising that wrecked our season last year.”
Mercedes preparing for a comeback in the 2024 season
Currently, Mercedes is focusing solely on the construction of W15. With Red Bull being penalised with reduced wind tunnel time, for breaching the cost cap, Mercedes is trying to make the most of this advantage.
The regulated floor height still has not provided any relief. All the tracks with long straights, like the Baku track still causes extensive bouncing, but Mercedes has taken a slightly different approach. They have converged there entire focus on designing the W15.
While Mercedes has accepted that the W14 had a lot of issues which made it lose the constructors championship after winning it consistently for 8 years, they are working hard on designing a new and improved W15. They believe that while designing the W15, they can apply some of its designs to the W14 after the summer break and hence tackle both the seasons at once.
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Riddhi Mondal
(1821 Articles Published)