In Mercedes they hope that the performance delay highlighted at the Sakhir weekend is mainly due to a lesser knowledge of their car than Red Bull and above all Ferrari.
There is no doubt that the Scuderia’s technicians in the six pre-season test days worked on a more stable basis than their direct rivals, without significant updates during the race, and this allowed for greater learning of the car’s behavior. Mercedes only brought the final version of the W13 to the track in Bahrain, a delay that would have become insignificant if the car had performed well from the first laps, but that was not the case.
While in the Sakhir tests Ferrari worked on the details with modifications to the bottom to find the right compromise between hops and performance, in the garage Mercedes were struggling with pen and paper on which to write down all the initial problems of the W13, some expected, others not. Everything dragged on until the race weekend, with the stopwatch certifying this delay. This is no small feat: nine tenths per lap compared to Leclerc’s Ferrari, more than seven by Verstappen’s Red Bull, a margin that was then zeroed by the safety car that entered the track on lap 44.
The Mercedes technicians are now wondering what it will be possible to solve in a relatively short time, that is the weekend in Jeddah and that of Melbourne, and how much will be recoverable by resorting to developments, and here the timing indicates a deadline between Imola and Barcelona.
They hope part of the gap can be recovered by analyzing Sakhir’s feedback and finding some corrections on the setup front. To eliminate the problem of hopping, the two W13s in Bahrain have been set up in a ‘safe’ way, that is to say safe, but sacrificing a substantial portion of the performance. The result is that the aerodynamics currently works in a non-linear way, as confirmed by Sakhir’s gps data, which show excellent behavior in some corners and much less in others.
“Our car has more potential than what we have seen so far – confessed a Mercedes engineer – but we still have to figure out how to pull the whole performance, because the hopping problem at the moment does not allow us to do so”.
Part of the gap accused by Mercedes is linked to porpoising, and it cannot be excluded that already in Jeddah there may be some changes to the bottom of the W13. It is not only the Mercedes garage that lives with this balance, all the teams know they can find more performance by lowering their cars, but at the moment there are those who have managed to find a better compromise than their rivals, an aspect that has drawn the first ones. hierarchies of the season.
However, confidence in the W13 project remains total. In Mercedes they believe in the (excellent) downforce data seen in the simulations, but at the moment there is still no knowledge of the car that allows you to control the downforce in the ideal way. And, somewhat surprisingly, there is also confidence in the power unit, despite the findings that emerged in the first stage of the season.
In the world champion team they do not believe that at the moment there are significant gaps between the various engines, but rather a situation of general equilibrium that sees Ferrari at the level of Honda and Mercedes itself. More race weekends and different tracks will be needed to get a clear picture, but there is currently no alarm regarding the performance of the power unit. Sakhir’s outcomes, for better or for worse, have little to do with engine horsepower, according to Mercedes.
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