The Mercedes F1 team carried out a shakedown of the W13 five days before pre-season testing, but did not fully grasp the severity of the porpassing due to heavy weather at Silverstone.
Lewis Hamilton and his new team-mate George Russell made laps at the Silverstone circuit on February 18th. The drivers braved the high winds and rain caused by Storm Eunice to get their first taste of the all-new car.
The Mercedes F1 team then packed up and headed to Spain and the Catalunya circuit for three days of pre-season group action. And I got an unwelcome surprise when I found the W13 bouncing around the circuit.
“When we were at Silverstone, we were in the middle of a rainstorm. We were in 70 mph winds,” explained Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ trackside engineering director.
“Often we start with a very high ride height for shakedown and then drop it later to avoid damage. Then we ran the car at normal ride height that day and started to see the problem.”
“But it wasn’t until I arrived in Barcelona that I could actually see it properly on a reasonable circuit and start to understand what was going on.”
There, the Mercedes F1 team will know the seriousness of Porpassing.
“It was probably the most complicated thing I’ve ever been through,” said Andrew Shovlin.
“That progress has been very progressive and very encouraging. Everything we were doing just made more sense.”
“What we didn’t quite understand was that the problem was very much like the layers of an onion. You peel it off, and no matter how many layers you peel off, you always see the same thing. And some I noticed that the mechanism of
“The problem is that dealing with that challenge during the race is much more emotional, difficult and stressful than dealing with it back at the factory where you can explore things in time.”
“The beginning of the year has been difficult. It’s been quite an experience over the past few years to find out that at best you’re at the front of the midfield from a team that thought you could go to almost every race and get pole and win. was the challenge of
“But the reality is that there is quite a lag between understanding in the factory and actually getting a race car faster. Barcelona was the first time we were able to actually put that learning into practice on the track.”
Andrew Shovlin has revealed that the Mercedes F1 team has called on Bouncing to focus on the long-term solution, not just to help in the opening race of the season.
“At that point, as engineers, we were looking at it from the perspective of having these regulations for four years,” explained Shovlin.
“And what really hurts the team is not whether we win in Bahrain, but whether we can grow within these regulations next season.”
“What scares us is that if we can’t develop something in the factory, that is, if we can’t build it, put it on the track, and see it work, the very currency we’re dealing with is the performance There was a point where it became worthless from a point of view.”
“It was very frightening.”
When the all-new car hit the Bahrain track, F1 managing director Ross Brawn said he was surprised F1 teams were suffering from so much bouncing.
Knowing the aerodynamics of the ground effect, former Ferrari, Brawn GP and Mercedes team principal Ross Brawn believed that the tech guru would find and fix the problem before the car hit the track.
“I’m a little surprised that some of them got caught up in it,” Brawn told F1TV after the first run of pre-season testing.
“I thought they had predicted that from the wind tunnel work.”
Unfortunately, the F1 team was unable to reproduce the problem in the wind tunnel. That’s because the F1 team damaged the wind tunnel belt before it reached the point where the aerodynamics could stall.
This meant that the modifications could only be tested during track sessions, leading to what Andrew Shovlin called “significant delays” between the factory and race cars.
But the Mercedes F1 team’s technical director declared after Hungary ‘no longer a problem’. He believes he has overcome the bouncing problem.
The Mercedes F1 team has not only scored six podiums, but double podiums on the last two occasions. And George Russell took his first pole position of the season in Hungary.
It was an important result as the Mercedes F1 team had shown decent race pace in the recent grand prix but their performance in qualifying prevented them from catching up on Sunday.
The Mercedes F1 team is beginning to dream of winning a season that has yet to be won. But first we need to recover the downforce we lost to fix the porpashing so we hope it doesn’t happen again.
