Mercedes has identified addressing its overheating rear tyre problem as a key area of development for its 2025 Formula 1 car.
The Brackley-based outfit excelled in cooler conditions and that was clear to see with its walk-in-the-park victory at the Las Vegas Grand Prix with George Russell.
The flip side of that was Mercedes’ vulnerability in warmer conditions whereby the W15 suffered with rear tyre overheating and degradation.
With the temperatures of the Las Vegas night race being an outlier, Mercedes has to maximise its operating window in 2025.
The rear overheating problem is one Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin wants to address.
“Rear overheating, that’s an area where I don’t think we are as good as McLaren, Red Bull or Ferrari, and that’s probably affected us most recently at tracks like Singapore,” Shovlin explained.
“We’re looking at what we can do to get temperature out of the rear tyres – and any work in that area is twofold: one is, can we put less temperature in, and the other one is, can we take more temperature out?” added Shovlin.
Mercedes wants to avoid bumps in the road with future F1 development
Mercedes has been consistently haunted by ride height troubles throughout the ground effect era of F1.
From 2022 onwards, Mercedes’ cars were susceptible to bumpier surfaces and it’s still a factor that the team needs to dial out.
“It’s very fair to say on those [bumpier] tracks, we do suffer more often,” Shovlin said.
“You can do analysis on how high people are running, and I don’t think we’re wildly different to anyone else, but ride is an area that we’ve been focusing on with these regulations.”
Heading into the final year of the current F1 rule cycle, the performance margins between all 10 teams are tighter than ever, so getting development right is key.
“The whole thing of development in Formula 1 is fixing problems, and can you fix them quicker than your competitors? That’s how you get to the front,” Shovlin explained.
The Mercedes man added that doing so in a timely fashion wasn’t the team’s strong suit in 2024, giving the outfit another thing to work on this year.
“If you look at when we brought our updates compared to our main competitors, we were often bringing our big package a couple of races later,” Shovlin said.
“But if we brought it earlier, it would be a smaller package.
“So the fact is, on average, over a season, we’ve not been quick enough when we deliver an update.
“We had a few races where we were competitive, the teams were trying to beat them, bring theirs, and they moved back ahead.”
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