Mercedes has revealed that the team’s challenging weekend in Australia provided some productive lessons in understanding the troubles with its 2024 Formula 1 car.
The German marque endured a torrid outing at the Albert Park Circuit as Lewis Hamilton retired with an engine failure and George Russell crashed out on the final lap.
Prior to that, Mercedes had been startled with its competitiveness over one lap as Hamilton exited in Q2 while Russell qualified seventh, eight-tenths from pole position.
Hamilton had trialled some extreme set-up avenues in the second practice session which “backfired” but was more enthused with the handling of his W15 car during FP3.
Mercedes Technical Director James Allison believes the correlation between the team’s relative pace regressing and the increase in track temperature was no coincidence.
“Almost no set-up changes occurred between FP3 and qualifying,” Allison said on Mercedes’ debrief. “We take fuel out of course, we turn the engine up to 11, all those things.
“But no significant difference on set-up because we felt we got the car in a decent window in FP3 and that was reflected in the timesheets.
“But we are starting to see a pattern emerge that most weekends we have a period in the weekend where we are feeling good about the car, confident about the car, but then in the paying sessions, in qualifying and the race, that slips through our fingers.
“If we were trying to draw that pattern together then probably the strongest correlation that we can make at the moment, is that our competitiveness drops when the track is warm, when the day is at its warmest and therefore the tyre temperatures rise with those of the track.
“The times when we have been at our best have been all in the sessions which are the coolest and so that gives us some clues about what we need to do as we move forward from here.
“But from FP3 to qualifying in Melbourne there was not a set-up change.”
Mercedes was satisfied that it had been successful in producing a benign car that eliminated the “spiteful” rear-end traits that encapsulated its troubled predecessor.
But Allison accepts that the inconsistent spikes it has combated across each of the opening three rounds demonstrate that it must widen the W15’s operating window.
“It is better defined in terms of the amount of time that will take,” he added.
“If you know what you’re shooting for, if you’ve sort of identified correctly an accurate assessment of why our competitiveness waxes and wanes, then you can work into the weekend a program that is dedicated toward trying to move the temperature and the temperature balance front to rear in your favour and using all the conventional set-up tools on the car.
“That work you can do back here in the factory and the simulation and so on.
“But if you conclude having exhausted the degrees of freedom that you have available to you in set-up terms that you still need to go further, well then that gets harder at that point because that will be that there are underlying characteristics in say the aerodynamic map that you’ve engineered or the suspension characteristic that is aggravating that particular feature, and in order to make it really heal up nicely then you would have to change those underlying features.
“It can be either quick and dirty or a little more involved and a little more complicated.”
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