The Real Reason for Mercedes’ Slow Pace | Saudi Arabian GP

mercedes performance this year has been nowhere near what we've come to expect so what exactly is going on at mercedes why did they seem to perform better in the race than qualifying but only slightly and do they have any hope of winning races this year to help answer those questions we've got scarves in to explain the f1 engineering so mercedes topsy-turvy season uh continued in saudi arabia what happened in qualifying for hamilton when russell had no problems whatsoever then we go to the race and it was perhaps the difference certainly russell held his own uh at the front of the midfield whereas hamilton was able to kind of gather some pace back up aided by that tyre strategy no real explanation to exactly why that has happened hamilton said that they'd gone too far with a set up strategy so mercedes were trying to set the car up for the race to get the hard tires working as well as possible and make them last but this seems to have gone wrong in qualifying especially for hamilton who certainly wouldn't have wanted to start back in 16. it's obvious that mercedes have a fundamental problem with this car and one of the biggest issues is our old friend porpoising but the problem isn't what we originally thought we saw lots of other cars struggle with this mercedes didn't initially but then certainly in the second tested clearly in the first race and slightly less to an extent in saudi arabia but you do have to remember that the jeddah track is billiard table smooth no gradient no bumps uh very few curves that you need to ride so maybe that was masking the problems so what the problem is with purposing this is quite interesting because this story has evolved since we first started seeing it back at the beginning of the shakedown and it's not quite what we thought very much in the past everyone's talked about poor person being an aerodynamically led problem the underfloor stalling and that really isn't the case i've spoken to quite a few engineers now and james allison in mercedes own debrief actually said and i'll quote the mechanisms that cause it is not completely understood yet but different from what the media are saying and what the media is saying is it's an aero stall that leads to the car bouncing up and down at the back now that's not the case as we understand the initial purposing is kicked off by suspension problems either the car grounding or hitting a bump and then as the cast tries to rebound the aero then starts moving about in terms of the center of pressure and the amount of down force you've got and that's on down to the rear suspension's undone the two start fighting each other then you get this uncontrolled purpose the only way that you can rectify this short term is to lift the car up and mercedes say that they did that they've lifted the car up but that will lose them performance which obviously they don't want but it's the only solution they have short term fixing this problem is not that straightforward and will take some time so what about those almost non-existent side pods on the mercedes are they affecting the car and are they making the porpoising worse well james allison chief technical officer at mercedes actually alluded to the poor person getting worse when they changed the pods now that isn't necessary that the two are directly related it could be that the amount of downforce changed with the new cyprus obviously that's what the team wanted but it's not to say that something fundamental in the shape of those side pods is leading to this portrait again as i've said it's much more about suspension than it is about aerodynamics so i don't think that we're going to necessarily see a change in that concept it's fundamentally sound it's quite different to what everyone else is doing and it's key to the way that they're approaching the downforce versus drag question for this year they've obviously decided that's the direction they want to go so if we see a change to the cypos it probably won't be because of porpoising more because they may want to take some drag out of the car to match what some of the other currently more successful cars are doing with theirs so we can't blame the zero pods but look at the results and you'll see that the mercedes engine cars are struggling towards the back of the field so is there an issue with the merck power units are they having issues with the new fuel or have red bull and ferrari move themselves significantly forwards all the mercedes-powered teams seem to be just very slow uh on the straights and struggling so first of all it's very hard to pick apart what the fundamental problem here is for all the mercedes runners now you could say that the common point is the power unit but equally we can see that all of those teams mclaren uh mercedes uh williams and aston martin have got fundamental aero problems and they're having to solve that by running lots of wing they're having to throw away various aspects of performance in order to gain lap time and that means that the power unit really to be honest we can't assess where the power units at because no one's really running flat out with the perfect setup now we've seen some data and it does suggest that all the mercedes uh are slower on the straights definitely but also clipping which means the hybrid system is running out of battery before the end of the straights and the mercedes in fact that you know the factory mercedes was actually losing pace at the end of the straights now that doesn't necessarily mean that there's a lack of power in the entire power unit clipping is more about where you're choosing to use your battery so maybe rather than focusing on the straights all the mercedes runners are choosing to use their hybrid deployment through cores to get acceleration in areas where they can use the performance rather than trying to run as fast as possible on straights potentially leading to porpoising so i don't believe that's an issue equally because all of them are having problems i wouldn't be surprised if they're just easing back on the strap modes that's available to the engine saving their engine life for when the chassis can really exploit it so that when they do have a car that really can use the most of its power unit they can just kind of turn it up to 11 get the maximum performance so far it seems that we have four cars battling for the podiums this year and honestly it's really exciting but what would be better than that well six cars including lewis and george but with mercedes currently off the ultimate pace is it likely that we'll see them battling for wins anytime soon well the factory at brockley do have a habit of turning things around quickly and we can never discount them and scarbs seems to agree well first of all it's the purpose so that could be something as simple as re damped uh re-sprung rear suspension maybe playing with the rocker geometry stuff like that could actually allow them to get that degree of suspension control to stop the poor person kicking off in the first place everyone will have it to a degree it's something that all of these cars run with at a very low level and you can see that as you go on to the straights but they're not going to have this violent purposing so i think that's the first thing is to be solved uh we look at jeddah it looks like they had it under control but as i said earlier it's a very smooth track when we go now to um albert park immila we have no idea the surface at miami that is really going to be quite struggle for them you know there's going to be lots of bumps lots of canberra in the roads uh you know maybe not such so much in the way of long straights but certainly there will be high speed sections so i think the next few races could be quite painful for mercedes while they sort out this rear suspension i think they'll have that sorted certainly by the time we get to spain maybe with some modified aspects of the aerodynamics and the build of the rear floor just to make sure that it's not bouncing up and down too much so we'd expect the spanish grand prix in may to be mercedes target for a bigger update and getting closer to the red bulls and ferraris if that's the case lewis and george will still have 17 races to compete and that's still a lot of racing and a lot can happen so we shouldn't write off mercedes just yet we started a newsletter so if you want to know more about f1 and want to know everything that's interesting in our sport each week sign up for free with the link below and if you want to know what i think of leclaire's racecraft against max click this video here cheers and i'll see you next time

Channel: Driver61

Views: 812,563

Keywords: Formula 1, Driving, Engineering, F1, Driver61, saudi arabian gp, mercedes f1, red bull f1, formula one, mercedes slow, lewis hamilton, george russell

Id: 2s14kQ4f5gA

Length: 8min 5sec (485 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 29 2022