The F1 breakthroughs Mercedes made in Japan

There are two prevailing perceptions about Mercedes, as of April 2024.

The first: it's built yet another lemon, and the design team will never get its head around the current quirks of the ground effect formula unless something drastic changes. That Lewis Hamilton called off a lengthy association with the German brand to join Ferrari should have been the writing on the wall, but everyone was too hung up on the notion of a concept change miraculously turning around the team's fortunes.

The second: the W15 is an all-new car, and one that the team has had to develop its understanding of from a blank sheet of paper. With limited testing in modern Formula 1, the opening races of the calendar needed to be employed as an extended test session. The engineers are diligently chipping away at the car like a team of highly specialised prospectors, hoping to uncover an untapped vein of performance.

PLUS: Japanese Grand Prix Driver Ratings 2024

Ultimately, the reality is probably somewhere between the two standpoints, leaning more towards the second. Let's be honest, Bahrain really isn't a particularly good place to test a car, so spending three days traipsing around the circuit offers very limited insight.

It's not like Barcelona, which can expose a vast array of differing cornering characteristics (and the much-hated former final sector did at least offer an ersatz version of slower-speed conditions); Bahrain is rather one-dimensional. It's fine if you've got an evolutionary car concept, but for something box-fresh? It doesn't really do the job, as you encounter little beyond long straights and acute corners. At least it's not as cold as Catalonia in the winter.

Case in point: Mercedes hadn't really seen the scope of its weakness in higher-speed corners until it touched down on Saudi Arabia's west coast for the round in Jeddah. This was exposed further in Australia, where Mercedes finally had two data sets for its W15 in high-energy cornering phases. For the Brackley squad's exploration of its W15, it's probably been quite handy that Suzuka was uncharacteristically early in this year's calendar.

Far from a hoped for podium, Hamilton and Russell finished ninth and seventh in Japan but cause for cautious optimism remains

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

That Mercedes thought a podium was possible in Suzuka, had it not attempted a later-aborted effort to make a one-stop strategy work, underlines that progression. Flashes of performance did emerge in Japan, briefly exposing that untapped vein of potential beyond the rock face, but the team didn't quite drill down into it directly. Nonetheless, it has made some very obvious breakthroughs with its new car to restore a tentative sense of optimism in the camp.

As team principal and CEO Toto Wolff conceded, the results from the Japanese Grand Prix weren't exactly stellar on paper. Ferrari had comprehensively beaten Mercedes on split strategies, and both Lando Norris' McLaren and Fernando Alonso's Aston Martin finished ahead of George Russell. Yet, Wolff was keen to address the insights that the team had managed to acquire across the weekend.

"When you look at the results: seventh and ninth in qualifying and seventh and ninth in the race, that's clearly not good," the Austrian mused. "And everybody knows that. But we've definitely made a big step forward in how we want to run the car, and in our understanding.

"We've followed a certain trajectory over the last years and keep turning in circles, and we came to a point to say, 'Okay, we've got to do something different here'"
Toto Wolff

"This was one of the worst tracks for us last year, and we're pretty close to the front runners - not Max, but the guys behind - in qualifying. That came as a surprise. We were very quick through the Esses; last year, we were nowhere. In the race, when you look at how it unfolded, we were trying to make a one stop stick.

"We probably over-managed the tyres and had an atrocious first stint, but a very competitive second and third stint in the moment we basically did what the others did. That would have looked completely different. So seventh or ninth, just not good - full stop. There's nothing to add, nothing to paint rosy.

"But, I think we're going away from Suzuka not happy with the result, but definitely there's more to come."

After qualifying, Russell spoke of inconsistencies with the W15 on low fuel, which moves the dial in each corner towards a higher speed. Since the car struggles in those conditions, the medium-speed corners start to become much more difficult to deal with. When speeds drop during the race, the Mercedes appears to glimmer less faintly - but when at the behest of qualifying results in a race where it's difficult to pass, the lack of assuredness on a qualifying lap stings a little more.

Wolff has been at pains to explain the various failings of the W15 this season

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Mercedes had been exploring that high-speed cornering weakness, and was concerned that its new concept wasn't generating significant gains in downforce over its troubled predecessors. Correlation issues between its simulations and the data generated in the real world are a concern, but Wolff revealed the team had uncovered slightly more bizarre situation in Australia. He explained that through its on-board measurement tools, the car does indeed have a significant downforce advantage compared to last year - but this is not coming through in performance.

"The car is so complex for us where we put it, in terms of the error balance and mechanical balance, and these two need correlate," he said. "We've followed a certain trajectory over the last years and keep turning in circles, and we came to a point to say, 'Okay, we've got to do something different here'.

"We are measuring downforce with our sensors and pressure taps. And it's saying we have 70 points more downforce in a particular corner in Melbourne that we had last year. But on the lap time is not a kilometre per hour faster, so it doesn't make any sense. So where's the limitation? And I think we wanted to tick some few boxes to understand: is there any limitation that we have spotted - and I think there is."

The 'points of downforce' is, externally, a somewhat nebulous term. In simplistic terms, it's a way of comparing lift coefficients (or negative lift, when addressing downforce). Lift coefficient is a variable in a downforce equation, where the downward force equals the square of velocity multiplied by lift coefficient, frontal area, and air density over two. Adding a point of downforce adds about 0.01 to the lift coefficient, although there are significant other complexities to bear in mind with reference surfaces being taken into account.

Let's make that example more visually obvious. If you've got a car with a coefficient of downforce of 5.00, a frontal area of 2m, an air density of 1.225 kg/m^3 (ie. at sea level) and travelling at 200mph (so, 89.4 m/s), our downforce level (in Newtons) equates to about 49kN. In kilograms, that's 4990kg - probably a bit high for an F1 car, but it works as an example.

Adding those 70 points of downforce on, you now end up with 5059kg - a fair leap in downforce production. It's not a wholly accurate calculation and there's other variables to be mindful of, but this provides a simple overview of how the points system works.

Those limitations that Wolff speaks of could relate to increased drag, but it's more likely that Mercedes hasn't completely extracted its potential through the ride effects in its suspension package. This is also new for 2024, with a switch to a pushrod rear configuration to limit the dampers' effect on the crawl space underneath the car. Tinkering with suspension set-ups over the Japan weekend did appear to offer the drivers more confidence, particularly at the rear end to limit tyre overheating and stress, but there's still plenty of work to do.

Mercedes could face another period of experimentation

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

"Everything over these two years which you have seen, points to that there should be much downforce then we believe it is," Wolff said in comparing the W15 to its forebears. "And now we've measured the downforce and it is there. We're just not able to extract the lap time out of it that we should, and that simulations show us.

"And it's not trivial. I see you looking at me, like, 'what the hell?'. Now imagine what we think!"

So, what's next? If the team does feel that it has not been able to unlock performance from the added downforce through its suspension set-ups, then it'll need to embark on more experimentation to find a configuration that works. It's easy to get lost in that world, thus the engineers will have to approach it scientifically and explore clearly defined sweeps through different variables to scope out a path to follow.

And then there's the high-speed correlation issue that it'll need to fix. It's hard to do that at a circuit, save from employing a series of aero rakes to explore the pressure field around the car, but the team will have to work with it.

Whatever the solution, it will not be as simple as just throwing the W15 in the bin and starting fresh once again, hinging purely on the hope that a new concept might do something different. After all, one needs to learn from weaknesses and defeats. Without them, a team will never know how to truly win.

Mercedes cannot afford to give up and start over on the W15

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Author Jake Boxall-Legge

Jake studied engineering at university, as his original ambition was to design racing cars. He was bad at that, and thus decided to write about them instead with an equally limited skillset. The above article is a demonstration of that. In his spare time, Jake enjoys people, places, and things.

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