Mercedes had their worst year for a decade in 2023 failing to win a race all season for the first time since 2011. Yet despite failing to grasp how to design a car optimised for there new ground effect regulations in 2022, the team made significant progress towards the end of that season.
George Russell won the Sau Paulo Grand Prix completing a Mercedes 1-2 which followed his two previous second place finishes in Austin and Mexico City.
Mercedes recover from “porpoising”
It looked as though the much maligned W13 was finally coming good and with just a small regulation change coming for this year, the silver arrows appeared to be in good shape for the chase to close the gap to Red Bull Racing.
Yet Mercedes technical director now admits it was that rule change which indeed Mercedes had lobbied the FIA to make which threw the team into chaos over the plans for 2023.
Having started 2022 with a car that bounced viciously, such that Lewis Hamilton could barely extract himself from the W13 at the end of the Baku Grand Prix, Toto Wolff and George Russell became highly vocal about driver health and safety issues the new ground effect cars were having on the drivers.
Duty bound to police all such issues, the FIA kept into action and instructed the teams to fit vertical oscillation sensors to examine the forces the drivers’ were suffering.
Mercedes Brazil 1-2 was the right direction
Further, they decided teams were running their cars too low which was creating the porpoising and so part way through the season mandated a change to the design regulations for 2023.
Yet late in 2022, Mercedes pretty much fixed the porpoising with changes to the floor geometry but as Allison now reveals to The Race, “but were left with a car which didn’t have as much downforce near the ground as it used to have. And still the downforce dropped away quite steeply when you went higher.”
The team focused on expanding the range of downforce at higher rear ride heights and the result was the 1-2 in Brazil.
With the cars for this year being regulated to run 15mm higher which didn’t affect Mercedes given their approach was to exploit more down force at a ride height above the new limits enforced by the FIA.
The FIA “raid” of F1 teams Hq with “zero notice”
HUGE Mercedes internal debate
Yet a huge internal debate began at Brackley as Allison reveals, “Should we cash in that 15mm and drop the car down, operate the car in a window that is 15mm smaller, because the cars will be less bouncy inherently? Or should we do more of what has done us well over the course of the year[2022], which was force ourselves to keep looking for downforce where it’s difficult high up?”
The technical team were divided and the discussion over which way to go raged back and forth for some time Allison says. It appeared logical to continue with their present approach given there a=was a significant degree of uncertainty as to where the bouncing would return as they lowered the car.
The eventual consensus was to play it safe because Allison explains, “it’s much harder to back yourself out of having driven off the edge of a cliff and finding yourself bouncing than it is to be too high, not bouncing and then lower yourself towards it.”
Allison believed to go the other path was a gamble and if others lowered their cars then Mercedes would be “the smart ones for having taken the cautious approach. So that was the route [we took].”
AlphaTauri move to England under way
Allison admits being “too cautious”
Hindsight shows Mercedes were too cautious and Allison now admits, “we would have been better placing our chips on that part of the roulette wheel, then we’d have got much sooner to the performance we’re at now.”
Of course had Mercedes stayed with their original philosophy of running the car as low as possible rather than petitioning the FIA for a regulation change, none of this would have happened.
Such was the disastrous nature of the decision over last winter, team principal Toto Wolff was driven to despair after the first qualifying session of 2023 in Bahrain. He told the media, “we thought we could fix it by sticking to this concept of car and it didn’t work out”.
Allison now reveals the team knew they’d made a huge mistake much earlier than during the Bahrain Grand Prix weekend, stating “it was pretty obvious in winter testing”.
Verstappen targeted by new FIA 2024 regulation
Monaco upgrade a new direction
It wasn’t until the F1 circus rolled into Monaco for the sixth race of the 2023 season. Mercedes had their first upgrade in an attempt to resolve the problem. And it was then the much debated “zero side pods” disappeared too.
But Allison stresses the zero pods were just a small part of the problem as there were floor modifications, a new front suspension mounting to increase the anti-dive along with inlet modifications to the side of the floor to improve the air flow into the Venturi tunnels and an improvement to the performance of the ‘coke bottle’ with bodywork revisions and new winglets.
“The laptime that came with the Monaco update was not remotely from the things that were visually different, apart from the wishbones,” says Allison. “The change to the sidepod fronts were [a case of] ‘let’s just not have that as a thing to worry about for the future’.
Mercedes technical director still believes the new side pods in fact cost about 0.2 tenths of a second in lap time but losing the zero pods was a variable that differentiated Mercedes from the rest of the field and ditching them removed a variable to understand.
Sacked Alpine boss now reveals shoddy French F1 operation
Hamilton WRONG about his seat position
All the modifications were designed to reverse the decision over ride height but the underlying architecture of the car meant this could not be full achieved. Hence why Toto Wolff recently stated for 2024 “we are completely moving away from how we laid out the chassis, the weight distribution, the airflow. I mean, literally, there’s almost every component that’s being changed because only by doing that, I think we have a chance. “
Allison turns to the topic of Lewis Hamilton’s vociferous and frequent complaints about the cockpit of the W14 being to far forward. Without criticising his driver he states this is not really an issue with the car.
He claims both Russell and Hamilton “didn’t like the turn-in instability of the [2022] car” but “Lewis’s way of expressing that is in talking about his seating position. George [Russell] doesn’t ever talk about his seating position, but he describes exactly the same ugliness to the car.”
“If we can fix that properly, the only part of Lewis’s seating position that he would still dislike is that he sees a bit less of the corner apex because it’s a bit nearer the tyre than if he’s a bit further back.”
“But the actual seating position itself is not giving rise to a perceptual issue that makes it hard for him to detect how to handle the car.”
Serious allegations against Steiner over Schumacher
Mercedes boss suggests other teams “lucked in”
However, Allison admits it is the concept of the car that makes them quick and suggests some teams may have found theirs either by, “good fortune or enormous skill.”
If Mercedes finally get the concept of their 2024 then they can start to climb the mountain that is the development race to exploit their new philosophy. Of course Red Bull have now been doing this with the same car design concept now for two seasons.
the cars that are the quick ones are the ones that have conceptual strength,” says Allison. “The execution of that concept will be more or less elegantly done depending on the quality of your drawing office staff. What makes the thing work or not work is what you value, what will bring me laptime.
Everyone says downforce will bring me laptime? OK, where? Do you want downforce at 80mm or do you want downforce at 30mm off the ground?
Mercedes retain a hint of arrogance over original concept
There remains a remnant of arrogance from the Mercedes technical team who designed their all new ground effect car for 2022 which delivered vast amounts of downforce. The problem was the bouncing – had that been possible to remove without easing the height of the car – the team had truly discovered a winning formula.
This author penned an article back in 2015, “is ground effect about to make an F1 comeback” six years before the new FIA regulations came into effect. In there is discussed that the previous F1 incarnation between 1978-1982 of “ground effect cars suffered significantly from ‘porpoising’, and were incredibly sensitive to pitching issues.
Mercedes failed to take this into account when they developed their original mega downforce capable 2022 W13 car. So to suggest had they been able to remove the bouncing then the car would have been fantastic is in actuality a pointless debate.
Even if Mercedes for 2024 to avoid false assumptions for their new concept and deliver a car mechanically as capable as the RB20 will be, they face an uphill struggle then applying the new design philosophy to each of the varied circuits the F1 circus visits.
The best they can hope for is weekends of brilliance matched equally by others of despair as they discover how their new concept in fact works in a variety of hot, cold, windy conditions with slow, medium and fast corners and surfaces that range from those as smooth as a billiard table to those which resemble a roller coaster.
READ MORE: Red Bull’s new car leaked
With over 30 years of experience in Formula 1 as an insider journalist, I have built trusted connections across the paddock, from race engineers and mechanics to senior team figures. At The Judge 13, I and a handful of trusted colleagues share exclusive Formula 1 news, expert analysis and behind-the-scenes stories you will not find in mainstream motorsport media.
You need to get a better proof reader. This article is riddled with spelling and grammatical errors.
If a seven times champion says the seat is in the wrong place, then the seat is in the wrong place. The technicalities don’t matter – you need him to be happy if you want him to drive at his best.