Mercedes has opened up on the impact its bouncing 2022 Formula 1 car had on the Power Unit, claiming that it caused damage to the engines.
In the early stages of the 2022 campaign, Mercedes had major porpoising issues that saw the W13 bounce heavily on the straights.
With the return of ground effect this year, teams sought to run their cars as close to the ground as possible in order to generate as much downforce as possible.
However, this in turn created a headache for Mercedes, who was unable to compete consistently at the front of the field for the first time in the turbo-hybrid era.
In addition, development of the Power Unit was frozen shortly before the start of the season which only added to the complexity of handling the bouncing situation, according to team boss Toto Wolff.
“We came out at the beginning of the season with some wobbles on the Power Unit, we didn’t like certain aspects of the deployment or drivability of the Power Unit,” Wolff said.
“Whilst in a frozen environment, you [speaking to Managing Director of the Mercedes High-Performance Powertrains Hywel Thomas] and your team were able to really add on performance, cope with the difficult environment of a bouncing car that was breaking your engine and still we were super reliable.
“The engine was performing well towards the middle of the season and the end.”
Mercedes had strong reliability throughout the year, with the only major in-race failure occurring at the season-ending Abu Dhabi Grand Prix for Lewis Hamilton.
Thomas says that ensuring its engine stayed reliable was a priority for the team – a mindset that differed from Ferrari, who insisted it would prefer a fast but unreliable car rather than the other way around.
Thomas also mirrored Wolff’s comments regarding the harm that was delivered to the engines through bouncing.
“When we came back from Bahrain and said ‘how are we going to do this? How are we going to put the performance on the car from our side?’” he said.
“It was ‘look, we’re going to have to do small gains’. At the same time, don’t compromise the reliability.
“By that period of the season it was becoming clear that the engines were taking a hell of a pounding.
“The bottom of the engines, when you [Wolff] came up to Brixworth last week and you saw some of the parts that were off the race engines, it’s quite a surprise to see exactly how hard they were being hit by the ground.
“When you see Lewis and George [Russell] looking a bit uncomfortable getting out of the cars, the PUs were doing much of the same.”
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