How has Mercedes fallen behind rivals once again in 2024?

For the third season in a row, Lewis Hamilton struggled to hide his disappointment with his Mercedes car after the second round of the Formula 1 campaign in Saudi Arabia.

“We definitely need to make big changes,” he told Sky Sports after finishing in ninth place. “We maybe haven't made big enough changes, maybe. If you look at the three teams in front of us, they still have a different concept to where we are in some areas. So we have performances to add , It's certain.”

For the most part, the noises coming from Mercedes during this year's pre-season had been cautiously optimistic. The team seemed confident that it had finally broken the development logjam of the previous two seasons, and early impressions from testing in Bahrain were that the W15 would be a much better platform on which to build performance.

After two races with the new car, it is clear that Mercedes is not where it wants to be.

Based solely on points scored – which, admittedly, only tells part of the story – Mercedes are already 12 points off where they are at the same stage in 2022 and 2023. Although the situation may not be not as bad as this statistic suggests. , the team needs to resolve important issues before the next two rounds at Melbourne and Suzuka.

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In the first race in Bahrain, an overheating problem was the cause of the race's poor performance, costing the drivers more than 0.5 times per lap. But in Saudi Arabia, the car performed reliably and simply lacked performance compared to its rivals.

In the high-speed corners, which make up a large part of the lap in Jeddah, the W15 was losing a lot of time. In the first sector alone, Hamilton and teammate George Russell were 0.4 seconds behind the Red Bull of Max Verstappen and also significantly slower than the Ferraris and McLarens. Over the entire lap, Russell (the faster of the two Mercedes) was 0.844 seconds behind Verstappen's pole lap.

In turns 6 to 8 of the first sector, the car was bouncing in a way that brought back unwanted memories of the problems Mercedes faced during the first year of the current regulatory cycle.

Since F1's rules revolution in 2022, airflow under the car has become key to generating downforce, but to get the most out of it, the car must ride incredibly close to the ground. The faster the car goes, the more downforce it exerts and the closer it gets to the ground, which in theory can produce even more downforce, but only if the suspension can maintain a stable platform for the car.

In Jeddah, the Mercedes hit the ground during qualifying and visibly bounced in turns 6, 7 and 8, making the car's behavior unpredictable and compromising its aerodynamic performance. Additionally, drivers were never satisfied with the car's balance at high speeds, finding that it had a tendency to oversteer.

It's an issue that Mercedes has focused its attention on since returning to base this week.

“There were a few things [that were causing the lack of performance in high-speed corners]“One of them was that the balance wasn’t great.” In these very fast corners, the walls are not particularly far apart, so those where the driver wants a lot of confidence, and quite often we tended to oversteer if he really leaned on the tires. You can easily imagine how unsettling this is for the drivers – it was a factor during qualifying and the race.

“In qualifying we also suffered a bit from the bounces, but it was less of a problem in the race. There's more fuel in the car, you drive a bit slower and it seemed to settle down and it wasn't so serious.problem.

“Then the biggest problem is we don’t really have enough grip there.”

It was clear just from looking at the Mercedes in Jeddah that the team had chosen to use a relatively weak and thin rear wing compared to its competitors. The team had hoped that the downforce generated from underneath the car would allow it to operate the thin wing, which would provide less drag on the straights and higher top speeds.

While it's true that the car had plenty of straight-line speed at Jeddah – it was one of the reasons why Hamilton was able to keep the faster McLaren of Oscar Piastri behind him before his pit stop – the problem of rebound meant its floorboard wasn't up to its share of the bargain in high-speed corners.

“We can see from the sensors that we have what we needed,” team boss Toto Wolff said after the race. “But there is always this behavior of the car in a certain speed range, our sensors and our simulations say that this is where we should have the downforce and we don't have it.

In final testing before qualifying, Hamilton experimented with a higher ride height to stop bouncing, while using a larger rear wing to compensate for the loss of ground downforce. However, the experiment resulted in no gains in high-speed cornering while adding drag to the car, which reduced its top speed.

“We learned that there is a bigger factor in the lack of high-speed cornering performance than the rear wing alone,” Wolff said. “We lack downforce beyond what we would have with a larger rear wing.

“We tried this with Lewis and there is something we don't understand, because we are fast everywhere else and we know we have a smaller rear wing, we compensate for what we lose in the corners, but it It's just the high speeds where we lose lap time all the time.

Shovlin added: “We were actually one of the fastest cars, if not the fastest car, in a straight line, so we were on a pretty light wing level. What we could do , it’s slowing down in sectors two and three.” [where the car was quick on the straights] to try to recover some of this time in the first sector [in high-speed corners]but ideally we would like to keep that and find a way to try and improve the sector in other ways than just putting more downforce on the car and then paying the price for it on the straights.

At first glance, Mercedes appears to have taken one step forward and two steps back with this year's car. Some of the undesirable handling characteristics of last season's W14 have been neutralized, but some of the problems it faced in 2022 when running the car low to the ground have resurfaced.

Yet Wolff, who was ready to abandon last year's Mercedes after his first qualifying session, remains calm about the situation.

“I changed my mindset,” he said Saturday night after Jeddah's disappointing performance. “I don’t think additional pressure on all of us will improve the situation.

“I think we have a problem with physics, it's not for lack of effort, it's not for the mindset, the motivation or the energy. It's all there and I can see the buzz in the organization.

“As runners, when you get such results you feel depressed, but we try to change that with the right motivation for the week ahead. That's why we have to believe that we can turn the tide, believe that our organization can dig in. get us out and I'm 100% sure we can.”

This process has already started. Shovlin said the team was planning experiments for the three practice sessions before the Australian Grand Prix to resolve, or at least better understand, the issues.

Although Melbourne is often considered a relatively slow speed track, recent changes to the layout have increased the number of high speed corners, while the general increase in performance of modern F1 cars means that there are no has only a few turns that can be considered weak. -speed. With Suzuka two weeks later, the two circuits could provide a watershed moment for Mercedes or a very deadly reality check.

“There is definitely data that we are getting back from Jeddah,” Shovlin said. “We are also looking at the data from the Bahrain race and the Bahrain tests and we will come up with a plan on how we approach the 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, the vehicle dynamics department, we're trying to design experiments there that , will hopefully give us a good direction for performance.” “