The tech misconception that has Mercedes giggling

Mercedes' bad days have changed. Last year, when it narrowly edged Ferrari over the course of the Formula 1 season, it lost a massive chunk of performance in Monaco.

The champion team slipped to third-best, its performance, percentage-wise, dropped a whopping 0.596%: in other terms, more than half a second around a 90-second lap. It was a phenomenon not unexpected of a longer wheelbase car prioritised to medium/high-speed corners and a straightline speed edge that had become tradition in the V6 turbo-hybrid engine era, encountering a track that featured few of the elements that design concept thrived on.

This year, in Monaco, Mercedes remained the benchmark team. In Canada, Ferrari's top-speed advantage helped it overhaul Mercedes over one lap, but only just. Then in the race, the Mercedes looked faster, even though Lewis Hamilton's win was the result of a controversial time penalty for Sebastian Vettel.

Goodbye low-speed weakness, hello F1's new benchmark in slow corners. It is a turnaround that counts as the latest Mercedes success in an era of constant improvement.

"The most important thing is to learn from the bad days, and we kept seeing those days when we really struggled in performance on slow speed corners and slow tracks," Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said during Sky Sports F1's pre-race build-up to the Canadian Grand Prix.

"We kept learning and learning and learning. Eventually we decided to shift the balance a little bit. "The car this year is [more dependent] on downforce, more draggy in a straight line, but the balance functions really well."

Mercedes' turnaround has prompted all sorts of theories. Does it have trick rear suspension? Did Ferrari and Red Bull, traditionally better at low-speed compared to Mercedes, fumble F1's new front-wing rules? Has Pirelli's switch to thinner tyres that nobody else can heat up properly played into Mercedes' hands?

Unsurprisingly, the search for the 2019 equivalent of the double-diffuser or exhaust-blown wizardry has begun in earnest.

It is not simply suspension trickery that is Mercedes' gain. In fact, the team insists it is the opposite

For starters, Mercedes does not subscribe to any suggestion it has developed some kind of special set-up. Technical director James Allison sat down with Swedish F1 broadcaster Viasat during the Montreal weekend, and during the interview was posed a simple question: "There's a big story with the focus on your rear suspension. Is that the secret to Mercedes' form?"

Allison, with a chuckle, replies: "I know that it's hard for people to believe us when we say stuff, but honestly this talk about our rear suspension just makes us giggle. There's this enormous story that has built up around what our rear suspension is and what it does. You just think, 'where on Earth did that come from, what on Earth is behind it?'

"We've just got a car with a nice aero platform, lots of grip from the aero platform that the suspension is good at delivering onto the road. The car goes quickly as a result of that."

If you believe Allison is deflecting attention, nobody would blame you. This is F1, where smoke and mirrors are part of the game. But Allison is a straight talker and it is difficult not to take what he says at face value.

Mercedes' engine advantage has been eroded as the turbo-hybrid era has developed, and Ferrari is at least level now if not ahead. Five consecutive title doubles, across a major car/aerodynamic rules change as well, do not happen if a team rests on its laurels. Of course Mercedes has had to work harder with its chassis and aero package to stay ahead.

Giorgio Piola and Autosport's technical editor Jake Boxall-Legge have already explored how Mercedes' suspension innovations may be achieving this. To paraphrase, at both the front and rear of the car the suspension construction is optimised mechanically and aerodynamically.

But it is not simply suspension trickery that is Mercedes' gain. In fact, the team insists it is the opposite.

"Yes, we do have a car that this year, thankfully, is going better in slow corners," says Allison. "Yes, it is stuff we've been working on. This is an aerodynamic challenge and it is an aerodynamic solution."

It is easy to be sceptical about this, and consider that ultra-strong aerodynamic performance would mean Mercedes' prowess was in high-speed corners, because it gives the car superb stability and means the drivers can just run faster and faster through, say, Campsa at Barcelona or the upcoming quick sweeps of Maggots and Becketts at Silverstone.

Yet downforce is not only generated at high speed, which is why even with an engine disadvantage Red Bull has always been so competitive in Monaco, or Hungary, or Singapore.

A car manoeuvring a tight hairpin or a 90-degree turn is perhaps not as sexy as nailing a fast right-hand sweep, for example. But a car will spend more time in slower corners than faster ones, so this is where more time can be gained or lost.

Also, slow-speed performance is straightline performance, because any extra speed carried onto the start of the straights still counts - even if the ultimate top speed is lower.

"There's a little bit of a misconception about slower corners," says Allison. "You often read commentary from people not inside the engineering parts of teams saying there's no aerodynamic effect in slow corners, they are too slow, it's all about mechanical grip.

"In reality the opposite's true. The most important corners aerodynamically are the slow ones. If you improve the car's aerodynamic performance at low speed, you get lap time in droves."

To say Mercedes has lucked in to more favourable rubber is disrespectful to other areas of focus and improvement

Hence the value in the phenomenon that Valtteri Bottas describes as a car that "feels like it rotates well" and a car that "is clearly a big improvement since last year, or the year before".

"It means you can brake a tiny bit later and rely on the front to get the car turned through to the exit," Bottas reckons, and such small margins can add up to a key advantage over the course of an entire lap.

That is why Mercedes has opted to trade off more efficient aerodynamic performance in a straight line, because over the course of the season there will be more time spent (and gained) through the turns than on the straights.

Or, as Allison puts it: "We're pretty useful in the corners. At most tracks that is a good thing."

Such aerodynamic performance is allowing Mercedes to work more compliantly with a key variable: the tyres. Without its focus on slow-speed performance, Mercedes would not be enjoying the thinner-thread Pirelli tyres as much as it is.

To say Mercedes has lucked in to more favourable rubber is disrespectful to other areas of focus and improvement, and also conveniently ignores Mercedes' five world championship doubles with the thicker tyres. But there is undeniably crossover between how well its car is working and how well its car is working the tyres.

Getting the tyres into the right temperature window is dependent on the energy a car is able to put into the tyres. It's not just the car's characteristics, it's the interaction between the compound and the asphalt, which is influenced by the circuit layout and the asphalt's roughness.

On the mechanical side it is impacted by chassis, suspension, and the downforce you're able to generate. So gains Mercedes has made in these areas, particularly at the rear of the car, will in theory work the tyres into that window range quite nicely. Especially as it has tended to work its rear tyres harder than most anyway.

It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. To make the most of its car's strong form in slow-speed corners, a team needs to get the most out of the tyres - and to get the most out of the tyres, a team needs strong form in slow-speed corners.

Bottas believes it is "quite difficult" to say Mercedes' performance is simply down to the tyres. He insists that "the car itself, the suspension and everything, is just a bit better". Which serves to further highlight that trying to find one silver bullet to Mercedes' current success is something of a futile endeavour.

Whether it's the aero platform, a suspension design or the spec of tyres, no part of an F1 car operates in isolation. One always impacts the other.

In defence of Pirelli's supposed influence on the pecking order, its F1 boss Mario Isola counters: "How to design the car, how to generate the downforce, to design the suspension, is the teams' job."

Mercedes is simply doing that job doing better than any of its rivals.