2022 of the Mercedes was characterized by a single word, which conditioned the entire season of the silver arrows and above all the first half of the championship of the Brackley stable: porpoising. The bouncing of the car, which affected many teams, however had devastating effects on the W13 of Hamilton and Russell. For most of the year the team failed to extract the potential from the car, managing to improve the situation – mainly thanks to the technical directive of the FIA – only in the last phase of the year. Mercedes engineers have admitted they made an error of judgement, underestimating the real impact porpoising could have had on the car.
In this sense, an admission of guilt came from the technical director of the track Andrew Shovlinwho spoke to the site Autosport. com. The British engineer acknowledged that both in the shakedown at Silverstone and in the first tests in Barcelona the team hadn’t really understood how much trouble the oscillation of the car could cause. “At Silverstone we were in the middle of a storm Shovlin recalled. They were the worst conditions we have ever run a car in. This certainly does not allow for a clear and sensible shakedown on a filming day“.
In Barcelona the porpoising problems emerged more clearly, but in that case the men from the star were concentrated above all on evaluating other parameters of the car and simply chose to raise the set-up. “In Barcelona we thought: ‘we’re not the fastest, but we don’t think we’re in bad shape’Why we expected to get good performance with the Bahrain package. The problem was that when we edited it, the porpoising went to another level. Most of the performance we intended to add didn’t materialize, because we had to raise the car further and at that point it was not possible to eliminate the rebounds ”.
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