The F1 car concept dilemma that Mercedes must answer soon

Mercedes has been quite open for months that its W13 car has proved to be the most complicated puzzle it has had to solve as a team.

In fact, it was its trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin who suggested that the problems with it were multi-layered. And the more it uncovered about what was holding the car back, the more it discovered things that were wrong.

“What we hadn't really appreciated was that the problem was very much like the layers of an onion,” he said last month. “You peel one layer off, and you were always looking at the same thing, no matter how many layers you were taking off. We realised that there's a few mechanisms at play.”

Calm heads, an intense amount of work over several months, and some pretty brutal Sunday afternoons where the team that was used to winning had no chance of coming out on top, Mercedes finally unlocked many of the issues that were at stake.

Steps forward with the car, allied to the W13 being well-suited to certain track characteristics, left it with a sniff of victory at Silverstone, Budapest and Zandvoort. It still holds out hope that at least one win can come its way this year - even if Lewis Hamilton confesses that Max Verstappen looks pretty unbeatable right now.

But as the current season rolls towards its end, thoughts inside the walls at its Brackley factory are not being dominated by what it needs to do to pull off a 2022 win that would serve as a good morale boost. Instead, these are now crucial weeks in determining whether Mercedes faces more of the same in 2023 or it can get itself back at the front.

Decisions it makes before the end of this month – primarily around the overall concept of the car – will shape its competitive fortunes for the duration of next year; and its choices are not necessarily easy ones to make.

Mercedes doesn't have an easy choice to make over its car concept for 2023

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Were the W13 a complete dog that had shown no promise and potential, then the job to create a worthy successor would be pretty easy; you would simply start with a clean sheet of paper and realise that what had been tried for this year simply didn’t work.

But one of the most annoying traits that Mercedes is having to work its way through is the fact that, at times, the W13 shows flashes of being super fast. Get it working in the right setup window on the right track, and the potential is there for it to take the fight to Red Bull and Ferrari.

That would point towards the team needing just some refinement to add a bit more downforce, expand the quite narrow setup window and then unleash some proper pace. The real difficulty Mercedes faces then comes from trying to iron out the weaknesses of the current package for the W13, but without losing any of the strengths.

Can the designers increase aero efficiency, add some more downforce, make it perform in a wider range of setups, and lift its Saturday pace so it performs more consistently over a race weekend – and all the while keep the elements that make it so strong in a race?

“I think the rules do change for next year, and that's going to change how people are looking at developing their car,” Andrea Shovlin

Throw in to the mix too that Mercedes’ CFD and windtunnel data coming out of Brackley has not always matched what the car does on track; its predictions for performance heading in to weekends have also been quite far off at times this year.

Even at this stage of the campaign, the layers of the onion keep on throwing up fresh things to discover. Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff is clear that, without total confidence in the data coming out of Brackley, there remains some big questions over what it needs to do. But there is no other option for the team than to commit soon for its 2023 design.

“We lacked the tools, the simulations and the understanding in uncovering the problems that we created, with the way the car was developed,” he said at Monza.  “We couldn't run it where we wanted to run it aerodynamically, and mechanically it was never in the sweet spot. It took us months to undo some of the steps we've done.

Mercedes' problems with its W13 have been hard to pinpoint

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

“So it's not that I believe we've discovered the Holy Grail and we understand everything and it's going to be a blast next year. But this is now a crucial period: literally over the next one to two months we need, with a certain degree of precision, to understand what needs to be done for next year.”

There is perhaps one factor that could help Mercedes nail down what is needed to be done: the rule changes that the FIA has imposed to try to eradicate porpoising.

The raised floor edges, being lifted by 15mm, serve to force Mercedes’ hands in moving it away from the concept it started the season with in trying to produce its peak downforce as low down to the ground as possible.

It was that characteristic, with all the intrinsic consequence of porpoising, floor flexing interfering with airflow under the car, plus increasing the likelihood of striking the track over bumps, that set off the troubles it has had to cure.

Next year there are no other options to ensure that the car produces its maximum downforce at a different ride height, and it’s a reset that has left every team – including Red Bull and Ferrari – needing to rework their own cars.

Both of F1’s 2022 winning teams admit that what worked this year may not roll in to 2023. As Shovlin said last weekend, there is a bit of mini reset happening.

“I think the rules do change for next year, and that's going to change how people are looking at developing their car,” he said. "You'd always say that the fastest car is the one that's got the best concept, so, you know, today that's going to be Red Bull. Where that goes into next year it’s difficult to say.

Will a 'mini reset' in the rules help Mercedes in 2023?

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

“Certainly we, as a team, have not fixed what our car is going to look like. We're still exploring different concepts. And that process will go on for some time. But we're just looking for what will give us the best development opportunity in those new regulations going forward.”

The constant over the 15mm floor edges at least gives Mercedes the starting point it needs, as work intensifies to finalise its approach. And for Hamilton, despite the ongoing fluctuations in form of the W13 and its unpredictability race to race, there is a sense of calm about what’s going on back at Brackley.

“There is potential in the car,” he said. “We've got downforce, it's just in some places it we're not able to utilise it. And ride quality, of course, is an area that we can always be better. So I'm comfortable the direction that we're going.

“I have 1,000% confidence in the guys back at the factory, who are stringing together all these pieces of the puzzle, and have no doubt that we will be back in a fighting position next year.”

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes W13, kicks up some gravel

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images