Mercedes is unwilling to compromise the strengths of its 2024 Formula 1 car to improve its high-speed performance following the team’s struggles in Saudi Arabia.
The German marque ended the race in Jeddah positioned as the fifth-best team on the road, with George Russell sixth and Lewis Hamilton languishing in ninth place.
Mercedes upheld a consistent deficit in the high-speed sweeps in the opening sector, which carried into the race as Hamilton got stuck behind McLaren’s Lando Norris.
Following the end of proceedings, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff admitted that the team had a correlation problem between the simulation suggestions and the race track.
Mercedes Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin has reiterated the Austrian’s assessment that the squad has a “fundamental” problem with its W15 challenger.
“Fundamentally the limitations that we had in qualifying and the race, they were broadly the same for both,” Shovlin elucidated in Mercedes’ post-race debrief video.
“So it’s telling you it’s not a small difference, it’s not a tiny bit of camber or a spring or bar here and there, it’s something more fundamental that we need to dig into and understand.”
While Hamilton had sampled a more loaded rear wing on his car in the final practice session, both Mercedes drivers opted to run a lower downforce configuration.
Shovlin has ruled out Mercedes sacrificing straight-line speed to tame its high-speed weakness, despite revealing it was losing “three or four tenths” in those areas.
“We were actually one of the fastest cars, if not the fastest car, in a straight line,” Shovlin acknowledged.
“So we’re on quite a light wing level and what we could do is slow ourselves down in sector two and three to try and recover a bit of that time in sector one. But ideally we’d like to keep that and work out a way to try and improve sector one by means other than just putting a load more downforce on the car and then paying the price for it on the straight.”
Shovlin has pinpointed three reasons contributing to Mercedes’ latest conundrum but highlighted that a lack of overall grip was the main shortfall compared to its rivals.
“One of them was the balance wasn’t great,” he noted. “So those very fast corners, the walls aren’t particularly far away [are] the ones where the driver wants a lot of confidence and quite often we were snapping to oversteer if they really leant on the tyres. You can easily imagine how unsettling that is for the for the drivers. That was a factor in qualifying and the race.
“In qualifying we were also suffering a bit with the bouncing. That was less of a problem in the race: There’s more fuel in the car, you’re going a bit slower and that seemed to calm it down and it wasn’t such an issue.
“Then the big one is we don’t really have enough grip there. So that’s one of the things that we are working hard on this week because Melbourne has a similar nature of corners. We’re doing a lot of work to try and understand why did we not seem to have the grip of some of our close competitors.”
With a two-week break ahead of the next round in Australia, Shovlin has explained that Mercedes is committed to trawling through the data to unlock solutions.
“There’s definitely data that we’re picking through from Jeddah,” said Shovlin.
“We’re also looking at data from the Bahrain race and the Bahrain test and we’ll come up with a plan for how we approach free practice in Melbourne.
“But it’s not just based on what we did in Jeddah. There’s a lot of work going on within the aerodynamics department, vehicle dynamics department, we’re trying to design some experiments there that will hopefully give us a direction that’s good for performance.”
