AeroDynamic wrote: ↑21 Mar 2022, 02:26
dialtone wrote: ↑21 Mar 2022, 02:04
zibby43 wrote: ↑21 Mar 2022, 01:50
It’s all relative though, and it’s quite clear to everyone that the ride height changes Merc have needed to make are more drastic than anything RB and Ferrari have done.
The W13 is quite literally frozen in development until the baseline proposing is solved.
I know you’re determined to somehow prove that Merc can’t fix their issues, but the evidence presented thus far isn’t compelling.
On the contrary I'm convinced they'll fix their issues, they won 8 WCC in a row and dominated an era, and there's no way they can be counted out even in this state. If they stay like this for a month I'll be a very happy Ferrari fan.
However I do find the narrative here funny. First was Merc was going to blow everyone away with the A car, it's Merc. Then they'll blow everyone away with the B car and it's ominous™, 1.5s faster in wind tunnel. Then they are just sandbagging their testing issues but will bring a floor and will fix this simple issue before the race. Other teams saying they tried that concept and chose not to go deeper on it wasn't true or they didn't develop enough, then they'll fix the issue overnight anyway before quali. Then in quali they're not actually 0.5/7 behind but only 0.3 if you cherry pick stuff. Then they aren't really 1s off pace in race, they just need to lower the car a bit and they'll gain 20 seconds a lap...
It kinda lacks for respect for other teams too, as if no other team can build a decent car and Merc can do nothing bad, and even when it seems bad, they're just sandbagging or part of some grander plan. Merc themselves are humbler than this.
In my opinion what is going on is: they don't know what the issue is exactly and don't know when W13 will be fixed yet, they will 100% solve this issue very very soon and the pace after that is absolutely unknown right now. It's also unlikely that all customer teams built mini-vans for the season while in 2014 any Merc powered car was lapping everyone around even on 3 wheels.
Here's another reality: if Ferrari was the team 0.5 behind in quali and 1s behind in race it would be Next Year™
What Merc did in the past is a lot less relevant now. They weren't operating under this new wind tunnel / CFD cap... no budget cap. They can't throw everything they have at the problem. their resources is completely bottlenecked by the regulation. They have a lot of the same talent and facilities but not the same resource of time and money to solve it. If a team can do it with this challenge, they can but it's a tall order depending on how challenging the issues are to understand/develop solutions for.
If they're going to be in with a chance of any titles, they need a reliability advantage like Ferrari had in some of the Fernando years to bring them closer to the top in the standings. And they must solve some of the issues that unlock big performance gains within 7 races really. After that they need to develop to get ahead or stay ahead of the other teams developments that they are working on right now while Merc try and fix their car.
you are right. it won't be a easy task for them, because rb and ferrari will develop their car while mercedes has to fix the issues first. But that means also that right now mercedes has the most potential step forward in their car, because what we all dont know is how much time they really lose because of the issues.
And while in the history rb was really good in developing the car over the season,ferrari most of the time wasnt. they had many great cars in the first races but were struggling to move forward, rb was the complete opposite. They were not on point for the first races many times.
Yes, now that means nothing because of new rules and stuff. But at the end it will be interesting which car concept has the most potential for improvements. Thats something we dont know right now. I can imagine that the issues bringing more issues and a lot of compromisses setup wise costs mercedes easily half a second.
When mercedes had the car called "diva" it was the same. When they could figure out the tire window there were unbeatable. So half a second is something absolutely possible coming with a perfect setup alone, maybe even more.
But another story is the engine. Right now- it looks like the engine itself is also far behind the others.