F1 Gp Abu Dhabi, how did Mercedes recover a second – Corriere.it

From Bahrain to Brazil, in eight very long and difficult months, Mercedes went from the great disappointment, in seeing how the W13 had enormous aerodynamic jumping problems, to the one-two finish at Interlagos, where even Toto Wolff managed to admit that his car was the fastest for the whole weekend. And even in Abu Dhabi he seems to have opportunities to gamble, albeit minor ones.

The 2021 Constructors’ world champion team had already come close to winning on a couple of occasions this season, in the Dutch and Austin GPs, not forgetting Mexico, when it looked like the team had the pace to challenge Red Bull but the choice not to use the softest rubber in the race canceled all hope. In these months of run-up, Mercedes has recovered more than a second of pace against Ferrari and a flat second against Red Bull. How? Through a path that is not simple since the primordial evil of the W13 is what an F1 team would never want to have, that is an inexact and unreliable track-factory correlation.

Blame? Not anticipating aerodynamic hopping (porpoising). The start of the season was unsuccessful, with the W13 detached by one second per lap. It was important for all the men within the team to get back into the game, in the darkest moment of the German giant in the hybrid era. Starting with Lewis Hamilton, seven times world champion, who made himself completely available to test on the track, testing experimental set-ups and also mounting extra sensors with a weight increase that exceeded the kilogram, on a car already very overweight by his at the beginning of the season.

The first package of developments has arrived in Spain with the aim of eliminating porpoising. The results have been positive. Now we understand hopping better. all an aerodynamic effect that is created by the oscillation of our bottom. It was difficult to come to this conclusion in a scientific way, but the team around Mike Elliott and Jarrod Murphy managed to do it and it was fantastic, in fact, Toto Wolff let us know.

However, the particular aerodynamic concept of the W13, which required very low ground clearance and very rigid mechanical structures to function, generated further problems with jumping where there were many bumps in the asphalt. The Baku street circuit this was the most evident example of the whole season and it was precisely on that weekend that the discussions to limit it officially began, with Technical Directive 39, which was then officially introduced in Belgium. The package brought to the track at Silverstone took another step forward, solving most of the problems from that point of view as well. During the first half of the season, Mercedes also brought experimental pieces onto the track to correct the inaccurate track-factory correlation with a particular reverse engineering strategy, i.e. the pieces were first tested on the track and then put into the tools present in the factory, going to correct the deviations in the final results.

To close the development program on the 2022 project, an important technical feature was missing which often created problems on race weekends, namely the too small setup window of the W13, which had to be enlarged to adapt to the different tracks as well as the different environmental conditions. A job that took a long time and appeared on the track with the package brought between Austin and Mexicocomposed of components that have allowed the W13 to lose a lot of weight, with very important indirect consequences in terms of weight balance, a bit like what happened with the Imola and Montmel packages for Red Bull.

It has been a difficult journey because there have been races where we thought we had solved most of our problems while others which turned out to be real setbacks, as Toto Wolff said at Spa. The W13 has thus officially become the second force in the field if we consider that, in a mini-World Championship that started from Austin, we would have Red Bull in first position today with 86 points, Mercedes in second with 74 and Ferrari third at only 43 points. In addition to the important development work on the aerodynamic side, the work relating to the power unit should also be underlined. With each introduction of fresh units, with the latest update brought to the track at Spa (internally Phase 3), all the potential of the engine has been unlocked.

We’ve made progress in every area of ​​the car. I would not forget the excellent work done on the power unit side during the season, explained the Austrian team principal. Without clearly forgetting the introduction of the Technical Directive 39 which, undeniably, favored the W13. However, according to Mercedes, not all problems have been resolved. On average, Red Bull is still ahead of us but normal because we are missing months of development, which we have lost to solve the problems of the W13, said the Mercedes operations director, Andrew Shovlinin Brazil.

We’ll have to wait for W14 before we can fix some issues with our current machine, such as high drag. But we are confident because we have taken a good step forward with the Austin update. This is really encouraging, because we now have three months ahead of us in which we won’t be able to test what we are planning at the factory on the track, and it is important to know that we are headed in the right direction.