Earlier this year during the Spanish Grand Prix, Mercedes F1 made a first major change to its W13 with the aim of stopping the phenomenon of rebound, which then disturbed it greatly and prevented it from performing.
And with George Russell and Lewis Hamilton finishing third and fifth in Barcelona, the German team had high hopes then of having already sorted out their biggest worries in 2022 and being able to think about world titles again.
Except that during the next two races, contested in Monaco and Baku, the rebound came back even more and Mercedes F1 therefore understood that it still had a lot to do. Moreover, the technical director Mike Elliott evokes a real “mass blow” after these two complicated tests.
“We couldn’t see any problems with the car because of the rebound,” Elliott said.
“The rebound was taking over everything. And once we got rid of it in Barcelona, we were like, ‘We’re going in the right direction’, before we got hit in the head with a club. of the next two races.”
“You then peel the next layer of the onion, sort of, and then you discover another problem. And in this case, the one that was built into the car over the winter. finally going in the right direction, but to erase all the mistakes, we will need another winter.”
If Mercedes F1 has not been able to solve its problems more quickly this year, Elliott believes that it is because of the lack of testing available to the teams during a Grand Prix weekend, as they are forced to quickly focus on the race.
“We have so little testing, there’s only the two hours on Friday before we really start working on the race weekend. And we need time to learn.”
“After Baku, we discovered a new problem. So we re-examined the data and our simulations and ended up finding something, but then you only have a short time to test. It is an aerodynamic problem. and it takes time to solve it.”