ringo wrote: ↑07 Sep 2022, 03:33
Did the major upgrade happen for this car?
Its almost as of nothing big has been put on the car all season.
I guess major upgrades went into the floor especially in spain and in silverstone but their was small updates every race, ie (the swooped in front wing endplate & rear wing & beam wing in Miami) , compared to the rest of the grid the W13 floor edge is the most complicated.
And for the matter of big upgrades, Mercedes engineers talked about how they took their time to understand the car and it's behaviour before starting to throw parts and ideas at the car hoping something to stick, which was impossible with the cost cap, eventually for the first 5 or 6 races for them it was just an extended testing regime to understand the porpoising and how to fix it and after that, they discovered that the suspension design was too stiff to handle bumpy tracks with how low they need to run the car to create enough downforce, which caused dangerous bottoming in monaco & baku.
At some point they found themselves behind in the development curve compared to RB & Ferrari, this putts mercedes in a hard turning point,
=>either to push with this current design(zeropod & downwash) and carry it over to 2023 hoping to find somekind of big leap over the winter.
=>or just bring little but good upgrades to this year's car , but focus the rest of resources on the W14 with a different concept.
And if i had to guess they're going with the latter, especially with the extra wind tunnel and CFD time they got now
