2023 Mercedes-AMG | Petronas F1 Team

[Jdn1327]

I had a feeling in my head that they changed the floor to sort the problems, then the same problem comes around.

Has a it one got a timeline of events, concerns, upgrades on the car since the start of the era?

Something just doesn’t seem to tally up

It's not a simple binary problem.

As Wolff said their problem is more about ride control than sheer downforce.

You can see their car is barely moving, be it on straights or over bumps, Corner-through balance looks easy. You look at all the other onboards and the cars are tricky.

You can add x amount of downforce which exacerbates that issue. You correct that issue and find you have a balance issue. You correct that issue and find you're back to square one or create another problem.
Between AM/Ferrari and Mercedes, they all seem well off in ride control relative to Red Bull.
But when compared to each other they are fairly similar and an aspect of trail and error that correlates with what we see from race to race with Ferrari being quicker in Baku and Merc in Oz and Aston in Jeddah.


The other tell is that despite those three being close in qualifying, come race day it's not even a race, it's Red Bull and then a big gap to the second tier. So I'd say it does add up, miracles don't happen overnight and 0.6+ gaps don't close after 4 races.

I know I'm speaking from my arm chair here but these types of mistakes seem very uncharacteristic of Mercedes. Is it due to this particular set of regulations? Or is it because they didn't have the right designer for the car?

[chrisc90]

Could they not make the ‘mid wing’ a tube which would stop the claimed lift? Or is there certain things around how it has to be covered?

[ValeVida46]

I know I'm speaking from my arm chair here but these types of mistakes seem very uncharacteristic of Mercedes. Is it due to this particular set of regulations? Or is it because they didn't have the right designer for the car?

A combination of things. New Rules, Budget cap, Porpoising, Resolving porpoising only to find other problems which weren't evident or as prevalent as they are now, and sticking to their guns with their concept, which I can't blame them for doing. They've rejigged a few things and we'll see where they end up but there's absolutely no chance of a sustained title challenge. Not only for Mercedes, that goes for the rest of the challengers.

[Farnborough]

Could they not make the ‘mid wing’ a tube which would stop the claimed lift? Or is there certain things around how it has to be covered?

The wing appears to do what really 100% of the teams are in agreement with, downwash. That aspect of it seems completely valid. All want to place that negative pressure toward the front of rear wheels point in the chassis which sidepods on their conventional iteration achieve.

The wing in this position would seem to feed that same strategy, no problem with that. But with it's opposing load, upward, entering the chassis as far as possible from what general consensus says is ideal.
The rear appears to be successful, perhaps too much and driving the original porpoise stance of the chassis.

Porpoise is exactly that, front lift, tail pushing rear down, to force a front upward trajectory, that's in the animal world. Look familiar? W14 appears more mild in it's iteration of surfaces than W13 in this respect, consequently more calm.

So they look stuck really, need downwash, but displaces lift to far from maximum under floor load being the penalty of this design.

Sensible is to pile on more front flap as Canard to negate mid wing lift, with obvious penalties in drag etc.

[Hammerfist]

Last year they claimed that they made a mistake and thought they could run the car very low to the ground. This year I think they gave up on running the car low and tried to make it perform with a higher ride height. The RB18 also ran high but still performed. I think this last fact threw them off course, because the RB19 now shows that you can run low. So I think Merc is back to trying to achieve the performance running the car low, but will it poirpoise? But it's obvious this is where the good efficient downforce is, from the floor and from being able to run low. So they're just going around in circles.

[langedweil]

I thought Ham still had remarkably a pretty noticable portion of porpoising, especially in the video with Oco. Remarkable, as imho it wasn't much around within other teams ? (or am I simply mistaken ?)

[Matt2725]

A few teams had porpoising at lower fuel loads at Baku. Even Red Bull had a small amount towards the end of the race.

[AR3-GP]

A few teams had porpoising at lower fuel loads at Baku. Even Red Bull had a small amount towards the end of the race.

No one was porpoising in Baku. That was the track being bumpy.

[pursue_one's]

New front suspension and floor will come to Imola.
New sidepods will come later.

https://www.auto-motor-und-sport.de/for ... imola-w14/

[atanatizante]

It is rumoured that the new front suspension that will debut in Imola allows a non-linear response in order to both better balance the car and most of all to maintain the same ride height between qualy and the race (something that we discussed last year when Driver61 explained on a YT video about the double rate spring system). This system was already tested at Baku on the rear suspension but limited setup time didn't allow them to fine-tune it ...

The other Imola update also is rumoured to be a modified floor along with a diffuser + new beam wing and a modified rear wing accordingly to better accommodate the new front and the rear suspension and altered rear wing both for minimising ride heights between qualy and the race and in addition to their quest for partially stall all the 3 rear elements (rear wing, beam wing and diffuser) in order to increase top speed, something that a former aerodynamicist said here about what`s RB19 is doing:



Then about much discussed side-pode changes we could see something about the upper floor that goes flowing straight towards its rear suspension, a downwash with a steeper shape to the end of the side pod along with a drastic undercut which turns into a powerful vortex down at the rear towards the diffuser ... so it could be something that features both RB19 and AMR23 cars :

[Jdn1327]

If you look at RB19 from top view and at suspension arms, they all seem to be angled forward (from tub to wheel mounts) suggesting that the whole car has moved backwards in its wheelbase, without moving pickup/mount geometry.

It's possible that something like this may be part of their thoughts. They did, I think, do this type of adaption with their prior chassis (period before 2022 regs) with front suspension to alter their wheelbase in season.

50mm wouldn't be too far out of range as a pure guess, to maybe squeeze the whole chassis backwards in its own wheelbase.

So the forward sitting position and bad feel can be fixed with upgrades?

Forward seating cannot be fixed without a new chassis, or sweeping the front wishbones forward so upgrades won't be able to correct it.

I'm not sure if it was Allison who said the seat was placed too far forward in the car. They won't be able to change it because of cost cap.

[pursue_one's]

the cost cap is really irritating...

[Hammerfist]

the cost cap is really irritating...

F1 is becoming so ghetto. Not long till you see duct tapes for solutions.

Perhaps the cost cap should depend on your position in the championship?

[BassVirolla]

To me, maximizing the resources looks as cutting edge (or more) than solving the problems pouring dollars into it.

Edit: No pun intended with "cutting edge".

[harty71]

A sign that the team could be favouring Hamilton? George is happy with the seating position, shouldn't it be down to Lewis to adapt?

https://www.planetf1.com/news/toto-wolf ... omplaints/