How a "baked in" F1 flaw consigned Mercedes to a year of recovery

“Desperately disappointing.” There aren’t many Formula 1 squads that would feel this way after securing a season-opener podium. But, as team director of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin tells Autosport, that was precisely Mercedes’ reaction to Lewis Hamilton’s third place in Bahrain, behind the two Ferrari drivers. 

To call it a shock would be something of an understatement. F1’s dominant squad, the constructors’ champion for eight straight years, had been humbled, needing both Red Bulls to drop out with fuel-pump failures in order to make the rostrum. 

“The damn thing doesn’t work.”

This was Hamilton’s response when he drove the now-infamous W13 in Mercedes’ pre-season shakedown at Silverstone four weeks earlier, the seven-time world champion left with “a feeling when I first drove the car” that it was not a regular race winner, let alone a world beater. 

That’s an important moment in Mercedes’ 2022 story. It was there that the team first spotted the porpoising issue that would blight its first season running a ground-effects car. But, as Hamilton and new team-mate George Russell were driving in unfavourable conditions thanks to Storm Eunice, Britain’s worst storm for over 30 years, Mercedes was generally running its new package higher than it might have. Not that it mattered, this was just for filming purposes.

But whenever it lowered the car – Mercedes’ first Silver (as opposed to black-liveried) Arrow since 2019 – it “saw that you could get this phenomenon”, says Shovlin, “but we didn’t really know much about it and what was causing it”.

As it turned out, every team on the grid had made similar discoveries during their initial running but, when F1 convened for its first pre-season test in Spain, Mercedes was easily towards the more extreme end of the pack in terms of the frequency with which its car was bouncing down the Barcelona pitstraight.

Early optimism, despite porpoising phenomenon, was soon replaced when Mercedes brought the final evolution of its car to Bahrain

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

At the same time, Shovlin says Mercedes believed “we’re not the quickest, but we don’t think we’re in a bad place”. This was because it had brought an early development phase package to Spain, where it topped the times. The second test in Bahrain would reveal its definitive 2022 chassis concept.

A week out from the season opener, the W13’s aggressive, very different, ‘zero-pod’ thin sidepod design was revealed. This had the added impact of leaving a larger rear floor area than its rivals. But here the team’s real trouble started.

“We were expecting to add good performance,” explains Shovlin. “The issue was that when we fitted it, the porpoising was a whole other level. We had to lift the car even further and at that point you couldn’t get rid of the bouncing [either].” 

The W13’s propensity to behave like a horse that suddenly “kicks you in the face”, in the words of Hamilton, initially robbed him and Russell of confidence. On top of that, it was draggy and heavy

Mercedes was competing with easily its worst-performing car since it vaulted to the front of the F1 pack in 2014. Its drivers were encountering massive “inconsistencies”, according to Russell. It would be porpoising along the straights, then in some corners but not others. In Bahrain, the issue was so severe and so random that the drivers were struggling to keep their feet pinned to the accelerator. 

“Bouncing was the dominant one that’s most visible,” Hamilton says of the W13’s problems. “But [also] global stiffness of the car – to the point where the suspension is pretty useless. Stiffer than the tyres. The tyres are then squashing and bouncing, so we’re bouncing on the tyres as well. And then just aero characteristics [changed unpredictably].” 

This meant that sometimes, when the drivers braked from top speed, the front of their cars would dip and the rear rise, with added instability when then getting back on the gas. The W13’s propensity to behave like a horse that suddenly “kicks you in the face”, in the words of Hamilton, initially robbed him and Russell of confidence. On top of that, it was draggy and heavy – something the team never solved as it added aero parts back on to find downforce when it discovered it could lose weight elsewhere.  

Hamilton’s Bahrain podium was followed by the elder Briton being knocked out in Q1 in Jeddah. Only retirements for the Red Bull and Ferrari drivers would mean further rostrum visits at this stage, which Russell secured in Australia when Verstappen retired late on again, and Hamilton fell behind with unlucky timing at the second safety car period. Imola was another early low point – Hamilton came 14th in the sprint and could only climb to 13th in the GP, while Russell battled through back and chest pain from the repeated bouncing on his way to fourth.  

Q1 exit in Jeddah consigned Hamilton to a long day fighting back through the pack

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

While Russell was seemingly happier with the car’s unpredictable nature thanks to his Williams apprenticeship, Hamilton took longer to adapt. At the same time, he was sacrificing practice sessions where he already felt uncomfortable by trying extreme and verging on dangerous set-ups – “tried every setting you can possibly do” – to improve his car balance and gather data for Mercedes to dig into. 

After the W13’s limitations had been revealed, Mercedes was quickly into a deep period of self-assessment and adjustment. Shovlin says there was “quite a lot of stress and pressure and anxiety, and difficult conversations” between the engineers and team boss Toto Wolff and Hamilton “because we simply hadn’t done a good enough job”. But, this being Mercedes, it wasn’t dwelt upon. Instead, it first worked out where it had gone wrong.

According to team technical director Mike Elliott, “we didn’t get something quite right over the winter” of 2021-22. When pressed on this apparently single but devastating problem, he explains: “We had a result in simulation that caused us to choose a slightly different direction.”  

In short, Elliott says this error took Mercedes away from “what we targeted in the car, [which] interestingly enough, we had right when we started”. From there, Elliott uses the example of an ‘incident pit’ accident explanation theorised in the world of scuba diving: “It’s never the first thing that went wrong, it’s because people didn’t abort and a whole load of other things then went wrong that meant they were in a lot of trouble.”

The W13 had a fundamental flaw that was “baked in”, according to Elliott. He says it “wasn’t one that was massive” but nevertheless feels “if we’d have got it right, maybe we would have been three or four tenths quicker”. He won’t be drawn on what this is because “we’d be explaining what it is we’re trying to do over the [2022-23] winter and where we’re trying to go”. But it is assumed that this means addressing Mercedes’ concept of a big floor, which flexed under peak downforce load and triggered extreme porpoising.

Even though it was aware that the phenomenon could happen with ground-effects cars, Mercedes hadn’t spotted it earlier because its windtunnel models couldn’t be moved fast enough to mimic it, and trying to create it in CFD was computationally very expensive within F1’s Aerodynamic Testing Restrictions (allocated on a sliding scale based on championship position since 2021). 

Mercedes therefore had to make new, more efficient systems and tools to model its porpoising problem, “which would give us enough of an idea of what the flow mechanisms were that were affecting the phenomenon and how to get on top of it”, says Elliott. It also publicly railed against the time-gaining flexing-plank tricks its rivals had been running when these were revealed mid-season, and which were outlawed by August’s Belgian Grand Prix. 

Spain upgrades meant progress, but it wasn't immediately apparent as the W13 struggled on the street tracks that followed

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images

Behind the scenes, Elliott says that this early period “probably felt like chaos to those [at Mercedes] that were not involved in” fixing the W13 directly. But they soon started to make progress.

A major floor and front-wing update introduced at Barcelona in May “pretty much eliminated the aerodynamic part of the bouncing”. But then when Mercedes moved on to the bumpy street circuits of Monaco, Baku and Montreal, the stiffness issue Hamilton describes caused “another sort of slap in the face” that had to be addressed. Mercedes then did this to the point where Russell said in Mexico he’d forgotten “what it does feel like to have porpoising”, even though Hamilton disagreed.  

A final major floor and front-wing update introduced at the previous round at Austin in October had made the now much more predictable W13 quicker. This was also aimed at ensuring “there wasn’t something else we were missing”, says Elliott. That Mercedes mistake from last winter wasn’t about to be repeated and fully addressed in the coming W14. Although it was better, the W13 could still bite, as Russell found in Brazil qualifying. 

The W13 had a fundamental flaw that was “baked in”, according to Elliott. He says it “wasn’t one that was massive” but nevertheless feels “if we’d have got it right, maybe we would have been three or four tenths quicker”

Mercedes’ progress between early summer – when its complaints about porpoising/bouncing affecting its drivers’ health contributed to the FIA introducing its metric for measuring porpoising at the Belgian GP, which Elliott says “had no impact because we were already on top of the aero bouncing” – and Austin was clear.

In the first five races, it averaged just over a second per lap off the ultimate pace. From Silverstone onwards, where the Spain upgrade had been brought through the tricky street circuit sojourn, the gap shrank to 0.8s. From Austin to the end alone that came down to 0.6s. 

And, in the end, the W13 became a winner. After a “gamble” to try an aggressive one-stopper at Zandvoort had been thwarted by the virtual and then real safety cars just when it looked like Hamilton might threaten eventual the winner, two-stopping home hero Max Verstappen, the team had nearly been victorious at Austin and in Mexico.

It concluded that it never had the pace to keep Verstappen behind after Red Bull botched his second pitstop in Texas, but rued not going long on the medium tyres on which Hamilton and Russell had started in Mexico. There, both also had the pace to challenge for pole with the car’s drag problems minimised by the thin air.  

Although the Abu Dhabi finale’s long straights put Mercedes back adrift of Red Bull and Ferrari, it had already made an emotional return to the top step with Russell’s Interlagos sprint and GP victories. So much pain, plenty of gain, then, finally, the champagne rained.

A 1-2 in Brazil led by Russell was the reward for Mercedes' season of recovery, although Hamilton ended the year winless for the first time in his F1 career

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Hamilton’s ‘worst’ season and its benefits

The Mercedes W13 ended up with 16 other podiums in addition to George Russell’s Brazil triumph(s). By the summer, it didn’t need the Red Bulls or Ferraris to retire to get there, the package was a factor on merit if those drivers didn’t extract the maximum or their teams made strategy errors – a key factor in Lewis Hamilton’s run of five straight podiums from Canada to Hungary. There, Russell started from Mercedes’ sole 2022 pole. 

On paper, Mercedes completed a ‘McLaren 2009’ turnaround, but the reality is that such comparisons were never really on. For a start, McLaren started off in the lower levels of the grid with its MP4-24 and it wasn’t until Hamilton won in Hungary that it even scored a podium. Mercedes managed that from the off and did so in a season (and era) when F1’s success and pace spread runs much more unequally between the teams. The W13 was never really a regular Q1 contender, but needed much to change via its development programme to catch and threaten Red Bull and Ferrari.  

But there is no doubt that 2022 goes down as Hamilton’s worst, statistically, in his F1 career. He ended up winless and poleless for the first time over a whole campaign and finished sixth – ‘topping’ even his fifth for McLaren in 2011, the year he couldn’t stop colliding with Felipe Massa.

Hamilton found the W13’s issues “particularly challenging”, says Andrew Shovlin, to come to terms with after his controversial defeat to Max Verstappen in 2021. He’d wanted to hit back hard and fast, and said as much when the car was revealed in February, but couldn’t because Mercedes was “unable to give him a car to allow him to play that role”. 

Hamilton reckons his driving level would have netted fewer wins “as in the past” had the W13 been a true contender. But he puts this down to the focus-drain of fixing the problems, as well as a need to be “geeing people up” within Mercedes. This, he feels, means he was “a better team-mate to my colleagues than I have ever before”. Quite a building block for 2023.

Hamilton says he was a better team-mate than ever before in 2022 as he worked to solve Mercedes' issues

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images