The F1 treasure map where Hamilton hopes Mercedes hits gold

As one of the best circuits on the Formula 1 calendar, Suzuka is not only an amazing driver challenge, but it also exposes the strengths and weaknesses of cars like few other places. In fact, what tends to happen, is that the opening sequence of the track – as the cars snake left and right several times through the Esses all the way up to the Degner Curves – tends to exaggerate performance characteristics.

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If your car is nailed (just look at the RB19), then it hooks itself up beautifully and it dances around flawlessly here. If things are slightly amiss, then problems at the first turn get exaggerated more and more as the sector goes on.

As Mercedes’ head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin said: “The issue with that sector is the more you slide, the more your tyres get hotter. And you are already too hot. So basically, you just get punished if you don't have enough performance there. When the drivers are happy with the balance and when the car sort of hooks up in sector one, you can do some pretty stunning lap times.”

While this year’s Mercedes has been lacking downforce, Lewis Hamilton and George Russell have also found that the W14 has been lacking stability – especially at the rear. That is not great for confidence, and it has made the car not especially predictable. It was little wonder that Hamilton found he was losing more than half a second in just that first section of Suzuka – which is pretty much the gap around an entire normal circuit.

“That seven-tenth deficit we have in sector one is just all rear end,” he said. “Our car has loads of load on the front and not as much as we need on the rear. So, we’re a really long way down on that. For me, it’s clearly concept. It’s 100% clear that’s concept and we’ve got to change that for next year, which hopefully we will.”

Hamilton was losing half a second in lap time through the first sector of Suzuka

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

The word ‘concept’ has been a bit of a bugbear for Mercedes since the start of the new rules era, as it all too regularly got associated with the design of its sidepods.

Indeed, for many, the original designs of F1 cars were divided into three different concepts: the downwash (like Red Bull), the inwash (like Ferrari) and the zeropod (like Mercedes).

But teams never were on the same page with this way of dividing up the concepts. That was because the performance of the current generation of cars is not about what is going on with the bits we can see – it’s all about what is happening with the floor.

"When your resources are so limited, you need to be very careful about where you're searching for performance, because it's got to be fruitful. You've got so little tunnel time, the cost cap is making things difficult" Andrew Shovlin

The sidepod design is not something that alone will dictate if a car is successful or not; but it does play a role in how the airflow feeds and manages the airflow to help power the floor and diffuser. So, when Hamilton talks about the need for a new concept for 2024, with Mercedes already having ditched the zeropods from the Monaco Grand Prix, he is actually talking about a more holistic philosophy shift in how and where the W15 will deliver its performance.

Shovlin spoke a little last weekend about how Mercedes viewed what a car concept it.

“For us, we view it in a bit more complicated way than just what do the sidepods look like,” he said. “What the sidepods look like interacts very heavily with what's going on with the floor. And the floor is the thing that's generating most of the downforce. You use the word like we're going down a different [path], or exploring a different concept, but, generally, that, for the teams, will mean that there are changes right underneath the car and it's about putting the bits together above that are going to be conditioning the flow.

Mercedes finally ditched its 'zeropod' concept from this year's Monaco GP onwards

Photo by: Steven Tee / Motorsport Images

“Then the other thing, with a new set of regulations, is working out where you want to target the downforce. Where are you wanting to chase in terms of efficiency or drag levels? And a lot of the work we do when we're talking about going off on a different development route, is actually saying, where do we think the real value is?

“When your resources are so limited, you need to be very careful about where you're searching for performance, because it's got to be fruitful. You've got so little tunnel time, the cost cap is making things difficult… You don't want to be exploring in barren lands, basically.”

The last sentence fits in nicely with an analogy that Mercedes technical director James Allison has often made about each set of F1 regulations being like a treasure map – where there are pots of (performance) gold to be found, it’s just a question of digging in the right places.

For Mercedes, it’s dug in the wrong location for the last two years. In 2022 it tried to run its car too low, which left it at the mercy of porpoising. This year, with the FIA having raised the floor edges, it over-compensated too much and aimed its aero map around a ride height that was too conservative and therefore too high. This year has shown that if you want to succeed in F1, you need to be running as low as you can, while keeping the ride platform as stable as possible so you don’t getting yourself bitten by the car bouncing.

As McLaren team boss Andrea Stella said: “Ideally you want to run as low as possible. If we had the magic wand, we would design a car that is less sensitive to going close to the ground, so that you can run the car softer - and then you have more mechanical grip.”

For Mercedes, having not only learned its lessons but also observed the impact of the step-by-step changes that McLaren has made, the good news is it now has a much better idea of where it needs to be digging – even if it cannot be sure it has hit gold just yet.

As Shovlin said: “We're certainly not clinging on to any concepts that we have had before. We're very open minded, and we've had a pretty chastening couple of years. We are a team that's working very hard to try and get back to the front.”

Mercedes feels it is moving in the right direction with its car but knows it needs a huge performance leap to catch Red Bull

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images