The domino effect causing Mercedes' current F1 problems

“What Mercedes must do to fix the W12”. Don’t worry, it’s fine. You’re reading the cover feature from the latest issue of Autosport and Mercedes is facing a big job to keep its Formula 1 title streak alive. You have, however, just somehow travelled back in time to 15 April 2021.

Don’t ask us how, just stick a few quid on Max Verstappen winning the 2021 world title. Trust us, it’ll work out even when Lewis Hamilton is leading by miles as the final laps of the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix approach…

Once you’ve collected your winnings, sit back and relax until 7 April 2022 – and note if you please that Ferrari, yes, really Ferrari, is going to win the new season opener. Today, that point has arrived and the 2022 F1 season is well under way, with your inexplicable reality-changing journey complete.

It’s a new year, new F1 season, but something almost as far-fetched as a whimsical time-travel tale has really happened: the mighty Mercedes squad is simply unable to win races on pure pace.

Given its staggeringly long period of success since the start of the turbo-hybrid era, it seemed unlikely that what was then the Black Arrows team would end 2021 with the first blemish on a championships run that now stretches back eight years. But that happened and the W12 is only the second works Mercedes turbo-hybrid not bestowed with a Hamilton title accolade.

And, while the possibility was always there, it seemed pretty preposterous to consider that when the start of F1’s new car design era began, Mercedes would be the team to have most missed the mark. Sure, it has the clear third fastest car at the start of ground-effect’s return and is ahead of many squads that were hoping the rules overhaul would help them leap up in the opposite direction. But that is a major step down the order for a team that can absolutely claim to be F1’s benchmark best.

Hamilton claimed third in Bahrain after Red Bull's late reliability problems, but it was a result that didn't reflect the competitive order

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

It’s far away from Mercedes’ expectations at its typically bullish season launch back in February. There, Hamilton declared “if you think what you saw at the end of last year was my best, wait until you see this year” in anticipation of a renewed battle with Verstappen and Red Bull at the front of the grid.

But even if Hamilton produces an on-track performance level to better the sensational efforts he put in after being disqualified from qualifying at last year’s Sao Paulo GP, right now he needs crashes or reliability failures for any two of the Red Bull or Ferrari cars just to make it onto the podium. That happened in Bahrain, with his third-place finish once Verstappen and Sergio Perez had dropped out late on with fuel vacuum problems, greeted and celebrated by Mercedes like the shock result it absolutely was.

The biggest problem Mercedes faces is porpoising. For all the excitement around the new car designs, this is surely going to be the word of 2022. Every team has encountered it to some degree – even if some have had little bouncing but then discovered much bigger problems, such as a lack of overall downforce and pace, as has happened at McLaren.

The only way it could set its best times, with a car that still porpoised badly, was by raising its rideheight and lessening the ground-effect. Potential lap time had to be ceded

“Porpoising is something that caught all of the teams out when they first launched this generation of cars,” explains Mercedes chief technical officer James Allison. His words reveal just when the issue came to the forefront of the teams’ collective attention, as it was during the filming days that accompanied most car unveilings that porpoising began its journey to the top of F1’s lexicon.

Several teams are understood to have had to stop their filming days, which are essentially glorified shakedown sessions, once they saw what was happening. One team is said to have worn a hole right through its new machine’s floor, such was the severity with which the car was repeatedly striking the ground at high speed. They decamped to Barcelona, where at least one squad sent engineers to discover if those working at another with which it is closely aligned were encountering the same problem.

Trackside observations from those three days in Spain revealed the full challenge facing the teams, with Mercedes among the very worst for bouncing. For the Silver Arrows car, this was a near comical frequency. Engineers who had worked in F1 during its last ground-effect era 40 years ago were shocked to learn the problem had returned and surprised that the modern superteams hadn’t been expecting it.

PLUS: The mechanics behind porpoising in F1 - and how to fix it

The surprise concerned the windtunnels and simulation tools the teams have long used to build their cars. The former uses scale models on rolling roads to demonstrate how effectively aerodynamic solutions are working, but the belts these are placed on simply aren’t stiff enough to replicate the unyielding track surfaces the scaled-up cars were about to be unleashed upon.

Mercedes was alarmed by the porpoising problems with its W13 in Barcelona testing

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

When they were, air moving rapidly through the new front wings and leading floor edge venturi tunnels sucked the cars to the ground, faster and faster as the downforce from the rest of the chassis surfaces come into play. But it suddenly stalls when the floors flex and meet the solid track surface, with the new 18-inch tyres also lacking in give compared to their predecessors, and so the pressure rapidly releases. Repeat, repeat, repeat as the car closes in on its top speed and the driver is having a very bumpy ride.

Mercedes implemented several mechanical solutions for its Barcelona-spec car, which chiefly involved adding long rear floor stays designed to stiffen this part. At the time, these weren’t thought to be permitted for racing in 2022 but have since been confirmed as allowed by the FIA. Leaving Spain, Mercedes was on top, as its day three fixes led to Hamilton forging ahead of George Russell’s previous test-leading time on the final afternoon.

For the Bahrain test, the paddock’s attention initially focused on Mercedes’ “extreme” – per Red Bull boss Christian Horner – interpretation of the sidepod and side-on crash structure rules. This meant the W13 arrangement with which it completed that test and started the campaign has near flat sidepods, with a vertical opening more akin to the 1991 Lambo 291 than any of its contemporary designs.

But Mercedes was soon going from defending the W13’s legality, to briefing why it wasn’t going to be winning at the start of the new season. Its rivals refused to accept F1’s dominant squad wasn’t bluffing, but the scale of its porpoising issue was laid bare as the second test ended.

There, Russell was tasked with showing Mercedes’ hand in the final session performance-running shootout – but ended up 1.039 seconds slower than Verstappen’s test-best for Red Bull, with a car that was moving around wildly and porpoising even in the corners.

Mercedes tried plenty of solutions. It took a saw to the W13’s innermost underfloor strake at the front of its venturi tunnels in a bid to dramatically alter its overall aerodynamic profile and actually cut downforce in a bid to lessen the bouncing. But the only way it could set its best times, with a car that still porpoised badly, was by raising its rideheight and lessening the ground-effect. Potential lap time had to be ceded.

“We were caught out by it quite badly,” says Allison. “And the amount of porpoising on our car, especially when we put our first race upgrade package on in the last winter test, has been quite extreme.”

Increasing ride height and lessening the ground effect was the best way to reduce the porpoising effect, but meant laptime was ceded

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Testing still conceals so much of a season’s reality, but in practice for 2022’s first race a week later, Russell was having to come off the throttle when conducting his qualifying simulation effort, so bad did Mercedes’ porpoising continue to be. In Bahrain GP qualifying, Hamilton trailed Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc by 0.7s. The following week in Saudi Arabia, Mercedes spent the opening practice sessions trying “a few more experiments to understand the bouncing issue”, according to team director of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin.

“[There were] some which made it worse,” he added. “Some which helped. But we don’t yet have a solution to make the problem go away.”

"Behind us it looks like we have a bit of margin to that midfield. We need to do a good job to be ahead of them, but that margin buys us a bit of breathing space to allow us to experiment on the weekends" Andrew Shovlin

That was ahead of qualifying in Jeddah, where Mercedes’ pace deficit meant Hamilton ended up out in Q1 and Russell led the line in sixth – albeit losing the best-of-the-rest grid spot to Esteban Ocon’s Alpine. He put that right in the race, finishing fifth, but shipping “a second behind [Red Bull and Ferrari each lap] generally”. Team boss Toto Wolf declared Mercedes’ place in the current pecking order to be “totally unacceptable”.

“We’re under no illusions what that performance gap is, and in Jeddah it was ultimately a bit bigger than in Bahrain,” explains Shovlin. “But we’ve got quite a lot to find both in qualifying and on long runs if we want to challenge the Ferrari and the Red Bull cars. However, behind us it looks like we have a bit of margin to that midfield. We need to do a good job to be ahead of them, but that margin buys us a bit of breathing space to allow us to experiment on the weekends, to try and bring solutions to lift the level of performance of the car.”

Ahead, Red Bull’s RB18 appears to have had the worst of its pre-Bahrain porpoising dialled out – the car’s late-testing sidepod update and front wing experiments combining to alleviate the issue, with much improved ride smoothness ever since. At Ferrari, porpoising remains a notable feature of the F1-75, but the car is more compliant overall than the W13, which means its drivers can more confidently cope with ongoing bouncing.

Mercedes’ current performance predicament is compounded by several factors. First, it has a downforce problem – in that it apparently continues to generate too much. This means the porpoising continues to be so severe, because even with a raised rideheight the aero surfaces that are working well at the top of the chassis are pushing it down onto the floor, which stalls dramatically.

PLUS: The answers Mercedes needs from its low drag wing

Plus, while Mercedes’ current lowest-drag rear wing is helpful in corners, it is a serious burden on the straights – especially compared to the RB18, which is gaining a crucial edge on Ferrari by having better end-of-straight speed with a slippery, drag-reducing package. In Jeddah, Mercedes also removed its rear-end gurney flap in a bid to dump as much drag as possible, but still remained only half way up the order in the qualifying speed trap.

Hamilton's Q1 exit in Jeddah meant he lost time mired in battle with slower cars

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

“Engine mode [is a factor in all this] as well,” Russell also said in Jeddah. “The faster you go the worse it gets. So, it makes it harder for qualifying because we turn the engines up, maximum power, go quicker down the straight – which causes more downforce and causes more porpoising. We almost need to pre-empt this issue and also in the race when you have the DRS closed, you have more downforce than you do with the DRS open, and that’s another factor we need to consider.”

There’s also an issue with getting the best from the hampered W13 package right now. And this is familiar from the W12, and very familiar now you’ve gone back and been presented with what we were writing this time 12 months ago. Essentially, Mercedes is still working out how to set up its car to let its drivers feel as confident as they can.

The reason why the two silver cars started the Jeddah race so far apart was because a drive to increase front-end response on Hamilton’s W13 worked well in FP3 there, so the team “went a bit bolder” on this for qualifying although with “not a huge set of changes”, all per Wolff, but it ultimately robbed him of rear grip at a track where confidence is everything.

“We were experimenting with set-ups to find out where the sweet spot of the car is,” Wolff explained. “The outcome was that basically they had no rear end in the car [on Hamilton’s side of the garage]. And that explains that big deficit.”

Porpoising isn’t the only problem that is vexing teams up and down the grid in 2022. With the total minimum car weight now set at 798kg – to compensate for the rear floor stays such as those that have been permanently added to the W13 since late in the Barcelona test – only one squad is thought to be at or close to that requirement. That is Alfa Romeo, with Ferrari understood to be the lightest of the frontrunners and so gaining time over Red Bull and even more over Mercedes as a result.

Again, there isn’t a simple fix to this problem – a large portion of which stems from several of the standard parts incorporated in the 2022 designs, such as the funky wheel covers, actually coming in heavier than intended.

Then there’s Mercedes’ engine, which is no longer the class of the turbo-hybrid field. Ferrari’s 2022 engine gains after the underpowered pain of 2020 are clear to see with the stunning steps up the grid taken by its customer squads Haas and Alfa (which it must be said have also produced good chassis designs). Meanwhile, Red Bull continues to reap the benefit of Honda’s pre-F1 exit development progress.

Questions have also been posed about the potency of the Mercedes power unit as all of its customers struggled in Jeddah

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

Although Ferrari is thought by many in the paddock to be the new best hybrid power package overall – its acceleration speed is stunning – at the same time Mercedes insists that “most” of its straight-line time loss “is coming from the size of our rear wing”, according to Allison.

“If you look at the cars coming down the straights one after the other and just look at the frontal area of the rear wings that each team has, you will see that we were running the biggest rear wing,” he adds.

But perhaps the biggest hurdle Mercedes faces in addressing everything that is currently wrong with the W13 concerns a key off-track part of F1’s new era. As well as currently having 2.5% less windtunnel and CFD analysis usage time to make things right compared to Red Bull and 5% less against Ferrari thanks to F1’s modest aero-design performance balancing model based on last year’s constructor’s’ championship order, there’s the cost cap.

"After winter testing, I’d feared worse and I think actually the performance improvement we’ve managed to deliver from winter testing to the first race, while perhaps not visible to the fans and perhaps not reassuring to the fans, is reassuring in-house" James Allison

At $140million for this year, its restrictions mean Mercedes cannot simply throw additional finance resources at building a W13B that doesn’t porpoise. Instead, it must first do the best with what it has – through understanding the “lot of experiments” Shovlin says it went through in Jeddah practice – and make sure it has a suitable set-up for this weekend’s Melbourne event. This must ensure it can lock out the third row of the grid and have its two drivers equally confident in the package, all while undergoing even more trials to help what’s going on in its Brackley base.

This is using its windtunnel and CFD tools to simulate new developments around what Mercedes’ engineers now know will happen once the W13 is back on unflexing track surfaces. At least Mercedes can reflect on its recent aero development prowess, where the bargeboard and floor updates it added to the W12 at Silverstone last year brought it fully into line with Red Bull’s 2021 potential.

That was with a car design philosophy that was already over four years old – so it is reasonable to expect there to be a certain amount of low-hanging development fruit to exploit in such new and expansive regulations. But this will be the case for Red Bull and Ferrari too, so Mercedes is fighting against the wind with its upgrade plan and that also just won’t be as packed as in previous years thanks to the cost cap’s inevitable impact.

Red Bull and Ferrari refused to believe Mercedes was off the pace in testing purely because of its recent progress pedigree. In 2017 and 2018 it reversed early-season losses to Ferrari to triumph with commanding title doubles, while its 2019 upgrade plan (and the Scuderia underperforming) meant it forged ahead once the first races rolled around. A year later, it used the season’s delayed start to fix a considerable engine reliability problem and roared to its most recent championship double.

Mercedes' rivals believe it won't be long before the team is able to escape the leading midfield runners and challenge for wins again

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

“I’m fully convinced they’ll be back if they get the bouncing under control,” reckons Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko.

“Mercedes have been known not only for starting strongly, but mainly for finishing strong in the last few seasons,” says Ferrari’s Carlos Sainz Jr. “I strongly believe that they will get themselves back in the mix.”

And the Silver Arrows team itself? Naturally, tantalisingly, it backs a fightback.

“Of course, it isn’t just competing for wins that we wish to do – it’s competing for championships,” concludes Allison. “That’s the purpose of our team.

“It is a big job. We were something like 0.6s, maybe more, off the pace of the leaders in Bahrain [and 0.9s from pole in Jeddah] but we are carrying a lot of problems and a lot of problems that all have solutions and all of those solutions are within our compass to deliver.

“Yes, it is challenging but actually after winter testing, I’d feared worse and I think actually the performance improvement we’ve managed to deliver from winter testing to the first race, while perhaps not visible to the fans and perhaps not reassuring to the fans, is reassuring in-house, within the team, and what we have ahead of us. The way in which we are approaching the problems and the way in which we will bring solutions also gives me some comfort that we will get back to a competitive car quite swiftly and that we will be able to pursue the objective we have of championships.

“It is an ambitious car. Some will argue that perhaps we have bitten off more than we can chew with it, but we are very good chewers in this team and we intend to put these problems right as quickly as possible, hopefully in the next two or three races. But in any case we will put them right and we will get our car back at the front of the grid competing as we all intend to, to allow us to pursue our dream of championship success.”

Allison remains confident of optimising the "ambitious" W13

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images