Just looking back on this year with all the flex wings saga, I went and did a little research on Mercedes cars on this new era (2022-2024). People took
these words from the team, about something clicking and finally making sense for them and because there was a lot of attention on front wings flexing at the time, everyone just made the assumption that this silver bullet that somehow gave Mercedes a lot of performance in the midseason, was indeed the flexing front wing.
I never believed for a moment that a flexing front wing could be the differentiating factor between a car that struggles and a car that fights for wins. It could help a little with consistency when you're already at the top, but it has never been the "secret" to actually being at the top. Not in previous eras and I don't believe that it changed in this era as well.
And sure enough, Mercedes was already utilizing the flexing front wings to quite an extreme degree I would say, since back in 2022 :
It was very hard to find nose cam footage of this car for some reason, but I was certain that they must have had it back then just judging by how much angle there was on that front wing back in 2022 and I wanted to confirm those suspicions. Finally after some browsing, I came across
this video.
It's therefore logical to conclude that the flexing front wing was not a major factor in Mercedes' upturn in performance during the mid-season. Then that begs the question on what else could it have been?
Can't really know for sure, but I suspect their gimmick front wing with which they started the season has to do something with it. They kept minimizing its effect until they got rid of it altogether at Monaco. In my opinion, this was one of those ideas that worked well theoretically under the ideal wind tunnel conditions, but it never translated to on-track performance due to the many more variables that are introduced on a real racing scenario.
Other than that, I genuinely believe the "eureka" moment was more setup-related than a magical new part they put on the car that suddenly fixed everything. They were perhaps going about it the wrong way on prioritizing certain balance properties which might have been successful for them on the previous era, but it did not translate on these ground effect cars. It's inline with the fingerprint of their struggles, because they have tended to vary quite a bit from track to track. These old setup markers perhaps worked better at some tracks and worse at others and they were at a loss to explain why that was happening.
Once they found the right window, they probably had to re-adapt their simulation software to suggest the right setup from track to track, however I do think they were also flattered a bit by the run of cold-weather races which their car seems to love the most out of the top 4. They haven't been able to replicate race-winning performance on any hot-weather track.
Nevertheless, It does seem like they were still prioritizing the wrong things when it comes to the development path / plan, because the floor they brought at Spa has introduced a storm of new headaches.
