Mercedes first tested its W13 at Silverstone in February, when the UK was hit by storm Eunice, with gusts of wind exceeding 120mph, causing several transport networks to shut down. George Russell described the wind of that day as “absolutely insane”, but he also made sure that Mercedes couldn’t get a full idea of just how serious the porpoising problem was until the first real test in Barcelona.
Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ head of track engineering, said that although the team had discussed potential problems with the return of ground effect, they hadn’t anticipated the kind of mechanism that actually worried. “When we were at Silverstone, there was a storm, with winds at 70 mph,” Shovlin told Motorsport.com in an interview covering Mercedes’ season.
“We often start with a rather tall car to do shakedowns and more, to avoid damaging it and then lowering it later. That day, however, we ran the car at normal speed and started to see the problem. But it was just when we arrived in Barcelona we were able to observe it well on a reasonable circuit and begin to understand what was going on. “
Although Mercedes made updates to the car for the second test in Bahrain, the team continued to struggle with the car’s jolts, an issue that persisted throughout the season and which hampered its chances of competing with Red Bull. and Ferrari at the head of the group. Shovlin considered pre-season testing and the search for answers as a “special moment” for Mercedes, calling porpoising “perhaps the hardest thing we’ve ever had to go through.”
“But the progress has been quite progressive and encouraging, everything we were doing made more and more sense,” said Shovlin. “What we didn’t realize is that the problem was very similar to the layers of an onion. If you peel it, you always find yourself in front of the same thing, no matter how many layers you remove. And we realized that there are some mechanisms involved. game.
“The problem is that facing this challenge while racing is much more emotional, much more difficult, much more stressful than facing it at the factory when we can explore things in our own time. The start of the year was difficult, because, after having been a team that in recent years has gone to almost all the races thinking they could take pole and win, knowing that in the best of cases we were leading the group, it was a good challenge. But the reality is that there is a significant delay between understanding at the factory and the race car that actually goes faster. And Barcelona was the first time we were able to put what we learned into practice on the track. “
The problems forced Mercedes to reset some of its technical ideas. Shovlin said that if he had just focused on opening the season in Bahrain or on the first few races, he would have “probably taken a much more experimental path”. Instead, the team focused on finding a long-term solution to the problem: “At that point, as engineers, we were looking at it from the point of view that we have these regulations for four years. And what will really hurt the team is not. is whether we will win in Bahrain, but whether we can develop within these regulations in subsequent seasons. That was the thing that scared us: if we can’t develop things in the factory, make them, get them on the track, see them work, then the very currency we are dealing with, in terms of performance, becomes worthless. This, at times, terrified us. “
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