Last Updated on March 22 2024, 1:01 pm

Mercedes appear to be in a right mess as the Formula One circuit moves to Melbourne, Australia. As was the case in Jeddah, the team went about its first practice sessions with wildly different set ups on each car.

The team believes the W15 is inherently a good car, but because it was a complete rebuild from its predecessors the Mercedes team are having to re-learn the car to understand how to give their drivers the most stable but quickest base platform.

 

 

 

Mercedes still expirmenting

In practice one at Albert Park, George Russell was third and just 0.033s behind the quickest driver Charles leclerc in his Ferrari. However as has been the case over the opening two rounds for Mercedes, as the week develops, the pace of their cars appears to fall back.

Practice two saw the team experiment further with Lewis car, but the final standings had George Russell in P6 and now two thirds of a second behind fastest man Leclerc. Hamilton was a disappointing P18 over 1.5 seconds off the quickest time and Toto Wolff faced the media after the on track session was complete.

Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes director of trackside performance, had said before the session the team were “prepared to experiment to unlock some performance.”

“We’ve achieved the experiment but failed to unlock some performance”, said team boss Toto Wolff ironically. 

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Mercedes testing “backfired”

“I think in the second session we’ve gone through a dramatic set up change on Lewis’ [car] – and that has massively backfired.

“This is why we are having those sessions – on the other side of the garage it was a bit better, but we lack peak performance on a single lap – if he finishes that lap we’re a bit better – but overall it wasn’t a good day.”

Sky F1 presenter Karen Chandhok suggested maybe the team was experiencing groundhog day. “It feels like the same old experimenting and trying to unlock potential,” the ex-Lotus F1 driver challenged Wolff.

In a surprising about face, Toto admitted Mercedes were in fact searching for the ‘silver bullet’ that would transform their season.

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Toto Wolff “frustrated”

“If I said I wasn’t frustrated it would not be the truth – certainly we are –  we’re trying so much in all directions but don’t seem to have found that ‘silver bullet’ yet,” Toto continued.

“But we’ve got to keep trying, we’ve seen performance in this car before – I just don’t want to go back to and say we’re just not good in these regulations because we have everything we need to get on top of that and we will.”

Prior to the winter break, Toto Wolff claimed this year’s W15 Formula One contender would be a different design. ”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.”

As TJ13 cautioned over the winter, this approach is highly risky given the sacrifice Mercedes are making by starting from scratch. Gone is the correlation between the simulation tools and the real life track data Mercedes have collected this past two years as once again they grope in the dark looking for the best base setup for their drivers.

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Hamilton has ‘limited understanding’

Lewis Hamilton’s feedback thus far has been the W15 is less of a revolution but more of an evolution of the problems Mercedes have experienced this past two seasons. When asked about the feel of the car, Hamilton claimed in Jeddah, “I mean, it’s similar to previous years I would say. 

Yet ex-F1 car designer Gary Anderson writing in his column for the Telegraph criticises Lewis suggesting he has a limited understanding of what it takes for the engineers to produce a competitive car in this new ground effect era.

After the Saudi race Hamilton said that “big changes need to be made to the car,” observed Anderson. “He mentioned that the other teams around them still have different concepts, but Hamilton is talking about what you can see.

“The critical parts on these cars is the underfloor and Hamilton does not know what the other teams are doing there. What you can see is not necessarily what makes the car work.”

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Practice sessions ‘desperate’

Anderson persists sating: “He [Lewis] seems to be of the frame of mind that if Mercedes make their car look like a Red Bull it will go as fast as one – it will not. The W15 needs a lot more work than the visual concept but the worry is that they still do not understand what a ground-effect car needs.

“The fact that again, as in 2022, both drivers have diverged in their set-ups as the weekend [in Jeddah] went on is not a good sign.”

Gary is referring to the fact that as late as practice three, Lewis was making big setup changes during the one hour session,. When F1 drivers are usually fine tuning the one they have from FP1 and FP2.

Yet Lewis barely made it into Q3 as rookie Oli Bearman with less than an hours experience of driving the 2024 Ferrari almost knocked out the seven times champion with a time just 0.036 seconds slower than Hamilton.

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Lewis’ looking for “silver bullet”

Gary Anderson believes: “Hamilton has gone back to his 2022 approach of trying to find the magic bullet with set-up that he hopes will find half a second out of nowhere.

“They are clearly still experimenting with their car but I do not think the solution – and a performance leap from nowhere – is in the car any more.”

The sad reality of Jeddah may be coming to haunt Mercedes here in Australia which saw the once dominant F1 team just the fifth quickest car on the grid. Mercedes even split their tyre strategy last time out but both drivers cam home almost a second a lap slower on average than the Grand Prix winner Max Verstappen.

Gary Anderson believes Mercedes are a long way from solving their problems and said he “would not expect much to change for them in Australia, Japan or China.”

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Mercedes are “fooling themselves”

“Two races in and their performances suggest they are still suffering from an inability to overcome its limitations. It feels like a repeat of 2022 and 2023.

“In some ways they are still fooling themselves and this goes down to how they approach the weekend. Throughout Bahrain and Saudi Arabia they have looked competitive in the early practice sessions before dropping back.”

Anderson suspects Mercedes may be running very low fuel in the practice one sessions in an attempt to boost confidence from the drivers. And this is the reason Lewis and George go backwards during a weekend, which isn’t helping their morale or the confidence in the team.

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Formula One rolled into the furthest destination from its home base in Europe as the teams arrived in Melbourne earlier this week. The race in Victoria state used to be the F1 season opener for Grand Prix circus, but as pre-season testing became ever restricted and moved to Bahrain, the Australians lost this honour.

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