“Near the better end of it” : Mercedes makes headway with its troubling W13 challenger
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For the race at Silverstone last weekend, Mercedes made a number of adjustments in an effort to develop on the advancements it had made with a prior developmental drive in Spain. Although the team still lacks the speed to compete with Red Bull and Ferrari on a level basis and still struggles on narrow, rough street circuits, there is rising hope within it that its problems have finally come to an end.
The Brackley-based racing team’s mentality is now leaning toward power and performance instead of honing in the porpoising that caused problems for its drivers in the opening stages of the season. According to Andrew Shovlin, director of trackside engineering for Mercedes, “In the first few races, we were literally just sort of fighting to survive. And the drivers were fighting to survive with a car that was incredibly difficult to work with.”
“But we did a decent job of scoring points, actually, and picking up on the opportunities when others were unreliable. Barcelona was useful for us because we had something that wasn’t bouncing around on every circuit that we went to. But clearly a recent run of three street tracks highlighted another weakness and, to be honest, we’re just going through it: looking for the problems, and then we’ll try and apply our engineering skills to solving them,” added Shovlin.
Mercedes has finally found a way around the tricky W13
While the zero-sidepod idea has received most of the attention regarding Mercedes’ improvement and progress, the team is adamant that its upper body form played a minimal effect in the season’s early troubles. Instead, controlling the airflow around and beneath the floor has been the primary force at play. And in those parameters, even though the changes it made were not immediately apparent, its strategy was dramatically revised during the Spanish Grand Prix.
“In terms of the concept of the car, we’ve actually changed our car an awful lot since it first ran. It’s behaving very, very differently to when it first ran. Even though if you look at it from a distance it looks quite similar to what we had at round one aerodynamically, it is quite a different beast now. I think yeah, we changed concept in Barcelona perhaps in terms of the way the car was working, to try and solve some of that bouncing,” mentioned Shovlin.
The capacity of their new generation of cars to achieve their upper echelons of downforce with as high a ride height as feasible appears to be the goal for Mercedes, and that’s something that all teams are seeking. The W13 currently operates excessively low and with a suspension setup that is too tight for any but the smoothest of circuits.
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Rishika Saha
(445 Articles Published)