AA_2019 wrote: ↑06 Apr 2022, 18:49
dialtone wrote: ↑06 Apr 2022, 18:25
AA_2019 wrote: ↑06 Apr 2022, 18:19
Peter Wright, designer of the old Lotus ground effect cars was clear, you need a very firm suspension and then you have the issue with the flexing in the sidewalls of the tyres which might be why Mercedes have been favouring the harder tyres.
Despite that being Peter Wright, I'm sure the issue isn't as easy as "get a harder suspension and use harder tyres" because Mercedes would have taken 20 minutes to try that and see it fixed.
Err… they did try a harder suspension in pre season tests but it made it undrivable, pretty sure they needed more than 20 mins to test and figure that out or else they would not have wasted valuable testing time
The lower downforce rear wing will help to reduce purposing, then they can run the car lower to make up the loss of downforce and then they go back to the same level of purposing tolerance but with less drag. That should have taken them 20 mins to figure out during the pre season test, but clearly didn’t
As I said it already in this thread in the past, in my opinion any commentary that assumes Merc isn't smart, or hasn't thought of something obvious, is likely wrong or simplifying the problem too much. It should be obvious to assume that a team that won 8 WCCs in a row is stacked, so starting with this assumption, if it's taking them this long to figure it out, they are either solving a different problem than what people here are thinking or the problem isn't so trivial to solve for them.
And making the car undrivable by using a harder suspension is not a solution, maybe the compromises they chose don't allow for that, unlike other cars which instead have been able to deal with it that way, with slightly higher ride height.