Mercedes will start the Canadian Grand Prix from fourth position with Lewis Hamilton, while George Russell will start from eighth position, serving the slick tires hazard in qualifying without which the performance could certainly have been better. The Silver Arrows are thus in a position to aspire to the podium, as long as they express a step higher than Fernando Alonso’s Alpine and resist the ascent of Sergio Perez and Charles Leclerc. A possible placement in the top three would follow closely the one already achieved in Baku, but the results risk obscuring a much more critical situation. In fact, the Brackley team continues to show indecision on the set-up front, which is accompanied by the lack of effectiveness of the latest developments brought to the track and the specter of some political accidents.
As part of the set-up, both drivers of the Star approached the Canadian weekend by taking to the track in the first free practice session with the rear wing with minimum load available to the team, used in Baku after the debut at You love me. However, Lewis Hamilton continued with the same aerodynamic configuration, already from the second session George Russell switched to the most loaded spec, a decision which, having been taken on Friday afternoon in dry conditions, belittles the hypothesis of a more heavily loaded set-up strategy to favor qualifying in the wet. Although the set-up differences between the drivers of the same team are by no means a novelty in Formula 1, in the case of Mercedes the extent of these differences is surprising, with Russell and Hamilton resorting to configurations at the antipodes.
In fact, on a medium-low load track, George Russell uses the maximum load wing available to the team, recently used in Barcelona and Monaco. This is the same specification from the beginning of the season, pointed out at the time by the top technicians as responsible for the lack of competitiveness on the forehand, as the wing is one of the most voluminous and least efficient on the entire grid. It is also surprising how, while wanting to increase the load level on Russell’s car, the team did not go through intermediate configurations first, such as the carved upper flaps seen in action in Jeddah (below). The divergence between the two Silver Arrows on the aerodynamic level also affects different adjustments on the mechanical front, corroborating the words of Toto Wolff, who expressed the difficulties of the team in understanding the set-up needs of the W13.
Mercedes also presented itself in Canada with a new bottom, characterized by a conspicuous notch in the advanced part along the outer edge, with a function divided between the prevention of porpoising and the increase in the generation of load from the bottom. The new specification was rejected, however, with both pilots reverting to the previous version. Lewis Hamilton’s words from Friday evening perfectly describe the picture at Mercedes: “It was like every Friday, we experienced a lot of things. This morning we tried a new bottom on my car. It didn’t work, but it seems like a lot of the things we try on this car are struggling to work. In PL2 we experimented with very different setups on the two cars, just to try to understand if one works and one doesn’t. Anything we do on this car to improve it only makes it worsebut we have to keep working“. Failure to perform updates thus poses doubts about the reliability of the team’s design and aerodynamic simulation methodologies, close to perfection in the past technical cycle but less representative with the new aerodynamic philosophy. In such a context it becomes complicated for the team to plan the next developments of the W13 but even more to set the 2023 project on solid foundations.
Finally, on Friday in Montreal, Mercedes tested a double tie rod on the bottom with the intention of limiting its deformation and its approach to the ground, a condition that tends to trigger porpoising.. However, the second tie was removed on Saturday, an action around which speculations about the risk of protests by the competition have spread. The political framework thus seems to be agitated, in a context in which the FIA directive is about to enter into force to limit aerodynamic rebound.
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