![]() We are hoping to bring other updates later in the year. “The Imola package are the first steps in that direction. “This takes quite a long time to develop in the wind tunnel, and you can’t just do these things overnight,” he said. “The upgrade that we’re bringing is going to help us to set the direction and to understand the various areas that we believe could play a role in why the car is so poisonous to drive.”Īnd if that didn’t hint strongly enough that this is a long-game play, Shovlin emphasised that this weekend was merely one step in a long journey ahead of the formerly dominant team. “I very much doubt that this is going to happen here. “I have never in my 15 years in F1 seen a silver bullet being introduced where suddenly you unlock half a second of performance,” he said. It must be exciting for the holder of the record for most career wins now that he’s more than 520 days into the longest victory drought of his entire career.īut expectations must also be kept in check - something Wolff is keen to emphasise given the number of times the team’s been burnt by false dawns in the last 17 months and still ended up almost 0.7 seconds off Red Bull Racing this season. “It will be really interesting to see where we are with the lay of the land, but I’m excited.” “I’m really hopeful that helps us take a step forward. “I’ve definitely been counting down the days for it,” Hamilton said of this weekend’s upgrade. ![]() Under the 2022 regulation changes the suspension was dumbed down to try to prevent a spending war on ever more exotic solutions, but like virtually every aspect of the technical regulations, the teams find a way to compensate. The final component is the new suspension, and in contrast with the overstated sidepods, the wishbone geometry has am underestimated effect on performance. The real performance gains are to be found on the floor - and unsurprisingly, less is known about how the floor will change, with teams keen to keep the underbody secrets under wraps for as long as possible. It’ll be interesting to see what it comes up with.īut while the shape of the sidepod is obviously important - particularly where it intersects with and gives stability to the floor, which was a key weakness of the Mercedes - the influence of the on-top bodywork is over-estimated. Instead the team would again be forging its own path. However, former tech director Mike Elliott, under whose stewardship this upgrade package was designed, said the team wouldn’t be adopting the sidepod approach of Red Bull Racing or Ferrari or anyone else. Gains in the wind tunnel were getting smaller and smaller while Red Bull Racing’s development speed picked up.įirst is the bodywork, which is expected to see Mercedes’s zero-sidepod approach ditched in favour of an alternative design. The summary is that the car concept Mercedes had developed for last season had already hit its development ceiling. “If we continued on that same development direction, we wouldn’t end up in a position where we felt we could challenge Red Bull.” “If we go all the way back to the test and race in Bahrain, that was where we realised that we didn’t have a package that was going to allow us to fight for a world championship,” trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin said. Unfortunately for Hamilton, it wasn’t until the start of this year, when the car had already been built, that the painful reality finally dawned on Mercedes that it was on the wrong track and last year’s problems hadn’t been fixed. Rather than the centre of pressure moving to the rear axle as the driver exits the corner to provide traction under acceleration, the car is staying too front-loaded, which instead saps confidence on throttle. He added that the bad feeling from his far-forward cockpit position was made worse by a dodgy aero balance. “That’s just something I’ve really struggled with.”
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