What to expect from Mercedes as F1 returns to Silverstone

It’s not just Lewis Hamilton, George Russell and Lando Norris heading to a home Formula 1 race this weekend. The British Grand Prix marks a local event for seven of the championship’s 10 teams – six of them based within a short drive of the Northamptonshire track, with Aston Martin’s factory just across the Dadford Road.

One of those six is Mercedes. With the German GP no longer on the F1 calendar and the team’s Brackley and Brixworth bases so close to Silverstone, this is very much home turf for the Silver Arrows in 2022.

But despite the man himself being an eight-time winner of the British GP, the event is not the Hamilton-bury festival – a sporting celebration of one man, 100-miles north-east from the famous music event that returned last weekend. Walking around the former Royal Air Force airfield and one will encounter a broad showing of support among the roughly 400,000 fans expected to pack into the site across the upcoming weekend.

Silverstone’s 2022 customers, following the success of ‘Drive to Survive’, are understood to be generally younger and more likely to be attending for the first time this year, with more women also attending than in previous eras.

Max Verstappen’s Red Bull team will enjoy considerable support, while a Ferrari victory would likely go down just as well with the knowledgeable fans packing Silverstone’s banks and grandstands as it did in Melbourne earlier this year.

But the British GP crowd hasn’t witnessed much victory variation in recent years (and was painfully absent from the two races here in 2020). Silverstone has become a rock-solid Mercedes stronghold in terms of car performance levels since the start of the turbo hybrid era. That followed Nico Rosberg’s win in the Pirelli-punctures-blighted 2013 event.

Vettel is the only driver to interrupt Hamilton's run of British Grand Prix wins stretching back to 2014

Photo by: Simon Galloway / Motorsport Images

Only Sebastian Vettel’s 2018 win after Kimi Raikkonen turned pole-winner Hamilton around at the third corner and Verstappen’s shock 70th Anniversary triumph in specific, tyre-torturing conditions breaks Mercedes’ stranglehold on the Silverstone win list since then. That’s a return of eight victories in 10 races.

But barring a stunning stroke of misfortune blighting the Red Bull and Ferrari drivers this year, or a dramatic weather intervention (and showers are currently predicted as a race day possibility), Mercedes’ Silverstone success streak is about to end.

However, this weekend remains a very important one for the team for several reasons. Firstly, after a three-race run that makes up what has become F1’s traditional late-spring/early summer street track sojourn, the championship is returning to a smooth, wide and fast setting. Mercedes now has the chance to test the breakthrough it made with its front wing and floor upgrades at Barcelona and assess its progress on understanding the issues that made Monaco and Baku in particular such a struggle.

This time a year ago, the team was heading to Silverstone in a not dissimilar situation.

"I remember last year, I went flat in FP1 around Copse. And I'm pretty confident I won't be doing that this year, even though we've got a substantial amount more downforce at high speed" George Russell

It trailed Red Bull’s RB16B on pace, but successfully introduced the final major development package of the ultra-high-downforce rules era for the W12, which closed the performance gap to Verstappen’s squad and helped set up the thrilling title battle that raged to 2021’s final lap. Hamilton and Verstappen colliding at Copse on the first lap of the Silverstone GP last year rather did the rest in establishing that tumultuous narrative…

Mercedes has upgrades coming for the equivalent point in 2022 too, which it hopes will mean the W13 can progress from the porpoising problem that plagued its early races. Team boss Toto Wolff says that is now “solved” in terms of occurring at the end of straights.

“We will be trying to push the car forward,” technical director Mike Elliott said after the Montreal race last time out. “Trying to get some pace from the car we've got, or from the package we've got, as well as the new bits we are going to add to it.”

The work Mercedes is going to be doing this weekend, which Hamilton suggests likely won’t be with the wide-ranging set-up “experiments” it has tried at most races so far in 2022, is fixing another W13 problem that its porpoising was previously obscuring.

Mercedes thinks it has got on top of porpoising, but Silverstone will be its next test

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

This is that with the car now being run stiffer and lower than it was in the season’s initial races as a result of Mercedes’ efforts to eliminate porpoising, it is now striking the ground badly in high-speed turns. That meant the bumpy street tracks were so painful in terms of driver comfort and car lap time.

The fast-corner “hopping” phenomenon George Russell has spoken of since Spain, is going to be something really worth paying attention to this weekend. Because, if Mercedes can solve it, the team believes it can unlock serious laptime.

It’s also bringing new parts to this race because it is such a familiar venue providing plenty of built-up set-up data, which will aid the practice experiments that have gone wrong, most notably for Hamilton, so far this year, and because its Brackley factory is so close. It wouldn’t be a shock to find Hamilton or Russell completing additional weekend simulator sessions to evaluate the new upgrades this weekend, as the seven-time world champion did ahead of F1’s first sprint race at Silverstone last year.

Plus, other squads may encounter the fast-corner hopping problem too – because this is the first truly high-speed track that F1 has visited in this new ground effect era, a setting where the cars are supposed to be at their best and fastest.

“You've got your porpoising down the straight, which is sort of the ‘wavy dolphin’ effect,” Russell tells Autosport in an exclusive interview for Autosport’s 2022 British GP preview magazine edition. “But then, through the corners, we have sort of bouncing – the car just hopping through high-speed corners.

“It felt awful from within our car, but we were the fastest in the high-speed corners in Barcelona. So, that was quite intriguing to see. From my side, it felt awful. There was so much more downforce and potential there, but we couldn't use it because the whole car was bouncing through there.

“So, I think the fast laps around Silverstone... I remember last year; I went flat in FP1 around Copse. And I'm pretty confident I won't be doing that this year. Even though we've got a substantial amount more downforce at high speed.”

But even though he was encouraged by Mercedes’ performance last time F1 raced on a full-time racing venue in Spain, with its pace on the bumpier Montreal track last time out an additional boon, Russell isn’t getting carried away with what his team might achieve at its home race this weekend. After all, his squad is too well drilled to over-promise and under-deliver, with its former junior also trained to strike the right notes.

Russell is hoping for his first British Grand Prix points

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images

“I think we've always known it's got a lot of potential,” Russell replies when asked if being rapid in Barcelona’s fastest turns provides encouragement for what Mercedes might achieve if it can eliminate its fast-corner hopping.

“We're sort of only really recognising now that the last three races have caught us by surprise in the fact that they are very different to Barcelona. And they were all very similar. The three street circuits were all very bumpy and they all had slow speed corners. So, if you have a competitive car in slow speed corners and one that's really robust over the bumps and the kerbs, you're gonna be fast at all three of those events.

“Now, we're going to Silverstone, we're going to Austria, Paul Ricard, Budapest – they're more traditional circuits, as such. But the facts are, we are uncovering sort of different issues from our package at every track we go to. So, there's no guarantees that we're going to light the world on fire when we get there.

“I think it all caught us by surprise when we went to Barcelona, and one, we weren't porpoising down the straight. But then we got to the corners, the two high speed corners – Turn 3 and Turn 9 – and were all bouncing through the corners. The Ferrari and the Red Bull, and us.

Elliott warns that even with the new “bits” Mercedes is going to introduce this weekend, he expects it to remain “a little bit behind those frontrunners in Ferrari and Red Bull” in “a normal race”

“If you listen to our onboard during quali or the Ferrari onboard, you hear [the cars] like 'CRUSH, CRUSH, CRUSH' through the corner itself in Turn 3 and Turn 9. Now that was at 250km/h. Copse is 300km/h. So, it's not going to be easy to navigate. But I think there'll be a number of teams in the same boat.

“And I'll be intrigued to see what the drivers' reactions are following this weekend as there's obviously been a lot of people quite sceptical about the current rules and a lot of them not really wanting anything to change. But I think this weekend will be quite intriguing.”

Elliott warns that even with the new “bits” Mercedes is going to introduce this weekend, he expects it to remain “a little bit behind those frontrunners in Ferrari and Red Bull” in “a normal race”.

But a return to home ground still offers the Silver Arrows another chance to reach a catalyst moment to galvanise around if its efforts to improve the W13’s remaining issues work out.

Silverstone will mark a return to traditional high-speed tracks that will allow Mercedes to gauge its progress

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images