By Carlo Platella
It was hard to imagine an all-silver front row at Silverstone, monopolised by that same Mercedes, which three months ago was struggling on the edge of the fifth force. It is the beauty of a Formula 1 that is never static, where developments rewrite the hierarchies from month to month in a delicate game of compromises. Developing without ruining the balance of the cars is the great challenge that faces the teams and in which Mercedes is making the difference over Ferrari.
The W15 comes back to life
It is not possible to talk about English qualifications without mentioning the great absentee of the day. Max Verstappen is the protagonist of an off-track excursion in Q1 in which he damages the floor, losing in his opinion 100 points of aerodynamic load, equivalent to 25-30% of the total. A probable exaggeration by the world champion, who however manages to squeeze between the McLarens of Norris and Piastri.
The Mercedes one-two is therefore missing the benchmark par excellence, but not the one with McLaren, who have been competing for months for the role of first force. The front row of the Silver Arrows is anything but random, with Hamilton and Russell constantly in the top five also in Q1 and Q2. It is a W15 that comes to life at Silverstonewith the cold and the damp track helping to bring the tyres into the correct usage window, conditions which also accompanied the pole position achieved in Canada.
However, Montreal was a completely different track compared to Silverstone, where aerodynamic efficiency and balance are needed, in addition to a wider range of corners. Mercedes has historically had an excellent interpretation of its home track, fighting for the podium even during the troubled 2022 and 2023 seasons. In general, however, Brackley stable is the protagonist of a significant risewhere the awareness of a residual delay compared to Red Bull and McLaren does not cancel out the satisfaction towards a car that has changed profoundly in recent months.
A car on the tracks
Between setup and updates, the changes made by Mercedes in recent months are small, but they are capable of making a huge difference. The lack of aerodynamic load has never been the main problem, but rather the flaws in the balance. The Brackley team went from an oversteering car in 2023 to an understeering one at the beginning of 2024, and then slowly found a more neutral balance. The challenge at that point was to correct the imbalances between high and low speeds, working to make use of that extra available load. “When you get the balance right, then the tyre temperatures are in the right window and the lap time benefits from that. They weren’t big changes, but they made a huge difference on the clock“says Russell.
In April, Toto Wolff highlighted how since the previous season the car had not acquired a single km/h of cornering speed despite an increase in downforce of almost 25%, an image of a car that was unable to materialize on the stopwatch the gains in the wind tunnel. Hamilton’s words in the post-qualifying session at Silverstone are eloquent: “This team has never struggled to add performance. The debate, if anything, is where one went to look for it with this generation of cars and from where the load was released”.
The Silver Arrow now seems to have found that performance that counts, with an aerodynamic load that can finally be exploited by the drivers without penalising balance and driveability. It is a W15 capable of resisting even the gusts of wind on the English Saturday, showing that yaw stability that is fundamental in changes of direction at high speed, when the car repeatedly changes orientation with respect to the air flow. More than understandable therefore the words of George Russell, who in the euphoria of the pole speaks of a Mercedes “On Tracks”.
McLaren confirms itself
The Woking team does not go beyond third position with Lando Norris, but with the optimism of having its cards to play in the race. At Silverstone McLaren shows pole position potential againmissed due to the inability to put together the lap at the decisive moment. Already in 2023 the British cars were able to fight for the top positions on the English circuit, but compared to a year ago the MCL38 is a decidedly more complete car.
“Last year the car here was clearly fast in the high-speed corners, while now it’s faster at all speeds”, reflects Andrea Stella. “Compared to last year, we have improved especially in medium and low mileages.” The path taken by McLaren is a further example of what effective development is: ensuring a car that works towards lap times rather than expressing record-breaking aerodynamic load peaks. A quality that Ferrari is currently lacking.
Red shrimp
Leclerc pays dearly for the mistake he made in Q2, which relegates him to the sixth row of the grid. The single episode, however, does not change the picture of a Ferrari in difficulty at Silverstone, with Carlos Sainz also behind Nico Hulkenberg’s Haas. After a long Friday of testing, on Saturday morning the Prancing Horse decides to set aside the aerodynamic package from Barcelona, preferring the one from Imola, which is less powerful in terms of downforce released, but also less problematic in terms of driving predictability. “The balance was slightly better and that’s the main reason why we went back to the old package”underlines Leclerc.
Carlos Sainz made a similar comment, repeating that in the Imola configuration the Ferrari guarantees better balance and driveability: “He didn’t give us any extra benefits, but it’s simply more consistent in the high-speed corners. With that surface we suffer less from rebounds and we had to make the car as much as possible constant and predictable to high mileages”. However, the return to the old package is not enough to put the Reds back in front, with the late decision on Saturday morning also limiting the time to optimize the set-up.
The Spanish driver also dispels a myth, explaining how the rebounds were present on the SF-24 even before Barcelona: “We had some bouncing already at the beginning of the year. It is an intrinsic weakness of the car, but the new version is clearly worse than the previous one. Hence the decision to keep the old one for Silverstone”. For Ferrari the objective is clear: turn the increase in load into a gain on the stopwatch. The Prancing Horse thus faces the same problems faced by Mercedes, the very one that today looks from the bottom up.
#Mercedes #pole #Ferrari #collapse #analysis #development #counts