How Mercedes became embroiled in its toughest F1 fight yet

Mercedes had an inkling as long ago as last winter that this year’s world championship might be tougher than any it had experienced since its domination of Formula 1 began in 2014.

As the engineers at the world champion team’s base in Brackley worked hard on developing the W12 car, the final one of an era before the introduction of swingeing rule changes for 2022, the numbers coming out of the computers did not make for happy reading. Not only had rule changes over the winter badly affected its car, but the gains it was finding as it looked for more performance were not as big as they were used to.

There was concern, but at that point Mercedes had no idea whether its rivals were suffering the same problems. Then, at the pre-season test in Bahrain, it realised it had fallen back a lot more than other teams. To the point that Red Bull – which, despite a convincing win in the final race of 2020 in Abu Dhabi, had been well over half a second a lap slower than Mercedes over the course of 2020 on average qualifying pace – now clearly had a quicker car.

When the 2021 season started, three wins for Lewis Hamilton from the first four races, all closely fought, all suggesting that the Mercedes and Red Bull were evenly matched, gave Mercedes hope. But then reality bit hard.

Monaco and Azerbaijan were, in Hamilton’s words, “a disaster”. Hamilton should have won in France, but Mercedes made a critical tactical error in the race, and then Max Verstappen dominated the two races in Austria for Red Bull, taking his championship lead out to more than a clear win.

The size of Red Bull’s advantage in Austria led to some admissions from Mercedes – development on the 2021 car had stopped, team principal Toto Wolff said, and all research and development effort was already on 2022.

Mercedes could still improve the car, Wolff insisted, but the championship, he said, was “against the odds for us now”.

How did a team which has dominated seven years of Formula 1 get into this situation?

Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing RB16B overtakes Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W12

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

The origins

The story starts back in the spring of last year. Formula 1 was in a hiatus forced on it by the coronavirus pandemic. The Australian Grand Prix had been cancelled, it was not clear when or even whether the 2020 season could start, and the sport’s bosses, in conjunction with the teams, were working frantically on ways to keep F1 alive.

A series of plans were hatched. To save money, the new rules planned for 2021 would be delayed by a year and teams would carry over their 2020 cars for a second season, with development heavily restricted other than on aerodynamics.

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The first idea was to reduce the size of rear wings, but when that did not produce the necessary reductions, attention turned to the floor – a key area for developing downforce

But this caused problems for F1’s tyre supplier, Pirelli. 2020 was meant to be the last season for its existing tyres before lower-profile 18-inch tyres of a completely new design were introduced in 2021. Delaying the new rules meant another season for the existing tyres, which Pirelli knew were already on the edge when it came to structural integrity.

Pirelli was concerned about the ramifications of continuing to use tyres that were already on the limit on cars that would have another year’s worth of aerodynamic development on them. It asked the teams and the FIA to come up with technical changes to slow down the cars for 2021, to take the strain off the tyres.

The first idea was to reduce the size of rear wings, but when that did not produce the necessary reductions, attention turned to the floor – a key area for developing downforce. It was decided that a triangular area of the rear floor edge – what has subsequently become known as ‘the cheese slice’ – would be removed.

2021 F1 car floor design rules

Photo by: Giorgio Piola

But when racing finally began in July last year, fresh problems emerged. Hamilton won the British Grand Prix on three wheels after his left front tyre failed on the final lap. Team-mate Valtteri Bottas and McLaren’s Carlos Sainz Jr suffered identical failures at very similar times.

In August, the FIA told the teams that Pirelli would be supplying the same specification of tyre in 2021, so further aerodynamic changes were needed. These involved removing a series of aerodynamic shaping devices – known as strakes, louvres and winglets – on the floor and rear brake ducts.

Racing Point objected, saying that the combination of these changes would disproportionately affect the teams running cars with low rake – the angle in relation to the track from front to back – compared with everyone else, who run high-rake designs. The only teams running low rake were Racing Point and Mercedes. The complaints were disregarded and the changes forced through on safety grounds.

Then, it emerged that Pirelli could, after all, supply new, stronger tyres for 2021. These were tested at the Bahrain Grand Prix and, although they proved slower and heavier and offered worse handling than the 2020 tyres, a decision was made to use them this season.

Fast forward a couple of months to the pre-season tests in Bahrain. The Red Bull looked stable, predictable and fast whenever it went out. Mercedes, meanwhile, was struggling, its car hampered by rear-end instability. And the same went for the team now called Aston Martin, formerly Racing Point.

Valtteri Bottas, Mercedes W12, leads Sebastian Vettel, Aston Martin AMR21 at the 2021 Bahrain GP

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Why are low-rake cars affected more?

It has become clear that the concerns expressed by Racing Point/Aston Martin as the 2021 rules were being developed last year were well founded.

Track the performance difference between each team’s cars across the 2020 races and their 2021 equivalents and a clear pattern emerges. Haas has lost the most performance from year to year – but then it would, since it has made it clear it hasn’t developed its car from one year to the next. But comfortably the next two worst-affected teams are Mercedes and Aston Martin.

After the Austrian Grand Prix, Mercedes’ car was on average 1.702% slower than last year, Aston Martin’s 1.655%. Red Bull’s, by contrast, is only 1.069% slower, Ferrari’s 0.907% and McLaren’s 0.78%.

Think of the two differing design philosophies used by Formula 1 teams as the difference between speeding up the water coming out of a hose by either opening the tap further, or squeezing the end of the hose

So why would a low-rake car be more badly affected by these regulation changes than a high-rake design? It’s hard to get a definitive answer, but one convincing theory revolves around the differing ways the two aerodynamic approaches deal with something called tyre squirt, the disturbed airflow generated at the contact patch of the tyre.

In this specific instance, the issue is the ‘squirt’ generated on the inner shoulder of the rear tyres, on the edge of the diffuser. Teams want the fastest, cleanest airflow running through the diffuser to generate optimum downforce. But tyre squirt is low-speed, messy air, the last thing an aerodynamicist wants there.

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W11, 2020 Hungarian GP

Photo by: Motorsport Images

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Think of the two differing design philosophies used by Formula 1 teams as the difference between speeding up the water coming out of a hose by either opening the tap further, or squeezing the end of the hose.

Both lead to faster flow, but for different reasons. The high-rake car is the open tap. It has a much greater volume of air flowing through the diffuser. The air is turned outwards by the vertical fences in the diffuser, creating an out-washing effect, which sweeps the tyre squirt out of the diffuser.

A low-rake car deals with tyre squirt in a different way. The floor edge is close to the ground and generates vortices – twisting bodies of air, like a mini-tornado. These are directed down towards the inner shoulder of the tyre and deal with the tyre squirt at source.

Removing the ‘cheese slice’ makes it harder to generate those vortices. Which means more disturbed air gets into the diffuser space, reducing downforce. And because the floor is closer to the ground, a low-rake car does not have the same air mass to out-wash the ‘squirt’ away.

Toto Wolff, Team Principal and CEO, Mercedes AMG

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

The impact of F1’s cost-saving rules

The next issue facing Mercedes dates back even further than the early days of the pandemic, but was exacerbated by Formula 1’s COVID changes.

Part of the shake-up pursued by Liberty Media since the US giant took over F1 in 2017 is a budget cap. Pre-pandemic, after years of wrangling, this was set at $175m per season. But COVID focused minds on the need to drive costs down further, so it was agreed to lower the cap limit to $145m (£114m) in 2021, dropping down a further $5m a year to $135m by 2023.

"Ever since the rule changes that were introduced aerodynamically for looking after the tyres, we have found it hellishly hard to find the sort of performance gain rate that we did prior" James Allison

On top of this, to try to close up the field, F1 has introduced aerodynamic testing restrictions (ATR), a sliding scale of permitted research in which the most successful teams are allowed the least and the least successful the most. For Mercedes and the other top teams, reducing their budget spend to the cap level is hard and has required some difficult choices. At the same time, for the first six months of the year, Mercedes as world champion was permitted only 90% of the standard aerodynamic testing allocation of windtunnel runs and computational fluid dynamics data (CFD).

So, in essence, Mercedes faced a perfect storm – a car badly affected by a regulation change, with a concept that was harder to develop than its rivals, restrictions on the ability to change that concept, at a time of new limits on both resources and research, while also having to design an all-new car to a completely different aerodynamic concept for 2022.

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W12, Valtteri Bottas, Mercedes W12

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

All teams have to balance work on their existing car with that on the next, and work naturally shifts away from one towards the other as the year goes on. This year those decisions are harder. But Mercedes, struggling to find the usual gains with its existing car, was faced with the problem of diminishing returns, while knowing that every bit of work it did on 2021 was money and time it could not devote to 2022.

Technical director James Allison says: “What has definitely been true is that ever since the rule changes that were introduced aerodynamically for looking after the tyres, we have found it hellishly hard to find the sort of performance gain rate that we did prior to those rules, so that has made our lives trickier than we wished it to be.”

It is not a question of sacrificing 2021 for 2022, simply a logical decision to devote limited resource where it will have most effect. With very little left to be squeezed out of the low-rake concept, Mercedes was no longer finding sufficiently useful gains. It made it easier to devote more time earlier to 2022 than it might otherwise have been.

“We know how the technical directives have evolved for 2021,” team boss Toto Wolff says. “We have been on the receiving side. Fact. We continue to stick to our principle of putting our resource into 2022, with all the consequences that can happen in 2021.”

Podium: race winner Max Verstappen, Red Bull Racing

Photo by: Alessio Morgese

What about Red Bull?

Red Bull finds itself in a very different place. It faces similar problems meeting the budget cap, and had only 2.5% more permitted research than Mercedes in the first half of the year – and the two swapped places from July onwards because Red Bull ended June leading the championship.

But last year’s RB16 was a new design concept for this team – as opposed to Mercedes’ design being essentially an evolution of a car first introduced in 2017 – and, firmly wedded to high rake, Red Bull was less badly affected by the 2021 aerodynamic rules.

The upshot was that 2021’s upgraded RB16B was now suddenly at least as good as the Mercedes, and Red Bull was still finding significant development gains. It was its first chance of a world title since 2013, against a rival that was struggling. This was too good an opportunity to pass up.

So while Mercedes had a few small developments on its car in Spain, and nothing thereafter until the British Grand Prix, Red Bull has continued to update its car. From Baku onwards this accelerated, with multiple vans turning up at every race with boxes and boxes of new parts, updating the front wing, nose, bargeboards, floor and diffuser, among other areas.

"We don’t want to make the same mistake as BMW did in 2008. [Robert] Kubica had a realistic chance of winning the championship, but the business plan was to switch to next season early on" Helmut Marko

Red Bull, too, is having to balance 2021 and 2022, but the tone of its public messaging on the issue is very different from that of Mercedes. Asked in Austria when development would stop on the 2021 car, team principal Christian Horner said: “Abu Dhabi.” Was he joking? Maybe. Maybe not.

“Look, you have to go week by week, race by race,” Horner said. “The team is doing a great job of balancing the challenges of this year and next. It is nothing new. We have had big regulation changes in the past. You just have to balance your resource and apply it to what needs it most.”

And of course “what needs it most” is a subjective decision based on where your priorities lie. Red Bull motorsport adviser Helmut Marko has been even starker: “We don’t want to make the same mistake as BMW did in 2008. [Robert] Kubica had a realistic chance of winning the championship, but the business plan was to switch to next season early on.”

Marko’s response to questions as to whether Red Bull would pay the price for this decision next year was: “No risk, no fun! We have to manage that somehow.”

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W12, Sergio Perez, Red Bull Racing RB16B

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

So can Merc stay in the fight?

Mercedes is a long way from giving up and has worked behind the scenes to haul Red Bull back, winning rule clarifications on flexible rear wings and pitstops. Still, at face value, things look bleak – even though Hamilton and the team currently lead the drivers’ and constructors’ championships after Hungary. Mercedes has stopped developing its car, and is facing a rival with an apparent performance advantage – and which is still improving its own car.

But Wolff rejects the idea that this means Mercedes has effectively resigned itself to damage-limitation this season.

“We never resign any battle,” he insists. “If I had to resign, you will see me going down the fire with my hand and the sword straight up. I am always a sceptical person, half-empty glass. But I am seeing the positives. This is a long game. We are not looking at a single race or a single result, but trying to optimise every year.

“We just need to do the best of our package. It’s not a secret. There is a trend. They have the faster package at the moment and we need to utilise our tools and our intelligence and our car set-up work, the tyres and we need to be faultless.

“And I believe if we can align those stars, we can win the championship. There is a long way to go. It is a very enjoyable life experiment that I see ourselves in. We have a great mindset in the team and the values we have are the immune system of the team. The immune system means you need to function when things are going bad, and after seven consecutive championships, we are fighting a tough battle at the moment against all odds.

“I wouldn’t say enjoyable is the right word, but it is the new experience that will make us stronger in the long run. Every day is a new learning experience and every day makes us stronger even if we have so many consecutive weekends that are tough. And I think we will look back many years from now and say: ‘That was necessary.’”

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes, 1st position, Valtteri Bottas, Mercedes, 3rd position, James Allison, Technical Director, Mercedes AMG, Toto Wolff, Team Principal and CEO, Mercedes AMG, and the Mercedes team celebrate after the race

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images