F1 | Hamilton: “In 2022 we lost 90 load points due to bouncing”

Mercedes started the 2024 season as the third force behind the still impregnable Red Bull Racing, but also Ferrari, a team with which a few months ago it fought to win and finish in second place in the Constructors' Championship. Objective, moreover, achieved.

After the first two outings of the season, Lewis Hamilton went unbalanced, stating that the W15 is actually an “extraordinary” car. In his opinion, Mercedes has not yet managed to exploit its maximum potential due to setup errors, therefore errors made by the team in putting the car on the ground.

“I think we have an extraordinary car, with great potential. I think at the moment we haven't made the most of it yet due to set-up errors, and obviously we're not satisfied with the performance in the first two races. But I think we there's still a lot of potential that we haven't exploited yet. So that's what everyone is focused on, trying to understand the car. And hopefully this weekend is a step forward. The amount of work done is enormous, everyone has their heads down to the numbers. I feel positive about this weekend. We've had two not-so-exceptional races, but we still have a long way to go.”

Hamilton, looking back, indicated 2009 as the year in which he started knowing from the start that he had no chance of winning. This makes it clear that the W15 is currently held in good esteem, even if Red Bull's – but also Ferrari's – performance advantage over the black-silver Arrows is considerable.

“2009 was probably the last time I had to deal with a really difficult car from the start. We knew it wasn't a particularly good car to start with. But we knew what it was. They had designed the car with too little downforce and they had set goals too low. But in this period, I mean, it's been really interesting to see the tools that the team had to develop to understand the flow structures under the bottom. Much more technical and complex than the previous generation of cars”.

“When you see the images that I'm able to create now, you can see where the flow structures go. And then there's the correlation between the wind tunnel and the CFD, with the actual track for the different surfaces that we're going on. It's quite interesting to see and you understand why it's so difficult to make it work. And then there's the stiffnesses: the tire stiffness, the suspension stiffness, the body roll, all these different things, the height, all these different positions you put the car in, the yaw and all these different things.”

Mercedes is still working to find the right solution for a single-seater that has changed its philosophy compared to the concept introduced in 2022, the now famous and nefarious “size zero” of the bellies, which caused the team's and Lewis' hopes of redemption to collapse after having lost the 2021 Drivers' title on the last lap. Hamilton revealed how much load Mercedes was forced to lose to cope with the bouncing that had hit it since the start of 2022.

“I think we are constantly working, facing an uphill battle. Red Bulls have solved the problem since the first test in Bahrain last year. They managed to solve the problem and then, once solved, we could build from that moment onwards. That's what we did: in the first race of 2022 we had to remove something like 90 points of downforce from the car. So we had the downforce, but we couldn't exploit it because the car bounced.”

“So we lost a huge amount of performance and we tried, every time we added or tried to add new performance, to bounce it back again. So, every time we took a step or two forward, it took five steps back. So it's been extremely frustrating, I think, for the engineers. But I think what's inspiring is that they haven't given up. They continue to show up every day and give it their all, and that's all you can ask for.”