Normally when there are two teams engaged in a ‘world’ duel, the spotlight is constantly on their pits. On the eve of the Spanish Grand Prix, there is indeed much anticipation regarding the technical innovations that Ferrari will bring to the track, called upon to respond to the growth confirmed by Red Bull. An important step in the Scuderia’s season, which will define the technical hierarchies that we will see at least for the next two months.
But there is also another box that takes center stage in the pit lane of the Catalunya circuit, and it is the Mercedes one. It could not be otherwise, considering that we are talking about the team that won the last eight Constructors’ World Championships and that suddenly found itself grappling with a serious (and unexpected) technical crisis.
The arrival of the Mercedes W13 in the pit lane
Photo by: Franco Nugnes
Today in Barcelona the curiosity about the news that the Mercedes will bring to the track is very high, the full-bodied package of updates begins to leak every time the mechanics move the two W13s inside the garage, offering opportunities to immortalize the details to the numerous photographers. stationed in the pit lane.
Some news have already appeared at the bottom, tested yesterday at Paul Ricard on the 100 km filming day, and for the engineers the hope is that the new solutions will be able to drastically reduce the hopping with which Hamilton and Russell have to deal with since the first tests in Bahrain. .
Correlation is the top priority
Mercedes hopes this weekend will bring a breath of fresh air, showing a direction in which to continue the journey towards the exit of the tunnel, but it is not just about performance.
The result that the Brackley technicians hope to find this weekend is the correlation with what they see in the wind tunnel and in their CFD systems, which is the source of the problems that made the management of the W13 project very difficult.
Even if of lesser importance, even in the golden years Mercedes faced less happy moments, facing problems head-on and coming to solutions. But he has never had to face critical issues without having total confidence in his ‘tools’, that is the tools that allow you to evaluate every idea and every change on site. What characterizes the technical crisis of 2022 is instead an unprecedented aspect: what they see at the Brackley headquarters is not what the track confirms.
Paradoxically, over the weekend in Miami the excellent performances shown by George Russell on Thursday raised many questions in the garage (and at the headquarters): why did we do well? How is it possible? What has changed? “If the unexpected has to be… it better be positive”, commented a Mercedes engineer, but the basic problem remains, namely that without a correlation it becomes difficult to identify the way out of the current crisis.
To help the technicians during the Barcelona weekends there will also be a cross-comparison with the data collected in the winter tests with the ‘provisional’ W13 version, which, net of the decidedly colder conditions in which the tests took place, did not seem to have big porpoising problems.
Detail of the endplate on the new Mercedes W13 front wing brought to the Miami GP
Photo by: Giorgio Piola
A crucial weekend also for 2023
If the W13 stops hopping, which is not obvious but possible according to the technicians, it does not mean that Hamilton and Russell will be able to fight for the victory again. There is a second step to overcome, and the Mercedes technicians in Miami have talked about it on several occasions.
The exploit in the FP2 session of the US weekend made it clear that there is a window in which the car ‘lights up’, but the question is about the size of this window. Without the aggravating circumstance of porpoising, it will be easier for the technicians to clarify this front, trying to understand how this car can be conducted at its maximum efficiency.
But at the moment the only certain thing is that for Mercedes the Montmelò stage will be tremendously important, both for the continuation of the current season and for 2023.
In recent weeks, the first meetings on the basic parameters of the cars that we will see in the next World Championship are already underway, and if Barcelona does not bring positive feedback it will be difficult for the Brackley technicians to convince Toto Wolff to focus again on the current concept of the W13, which will be splendid on the purely aerodynamic front but that the track has so far clearly rejected.
