Why Mercedes believes it can make the step F1 needs to fight Red Bull

The W13 proved unlucky for some, but not in the way Mercedes had hoped. The car chalked a sole pole and grand prix win apiece to represent its builder’s leanest Formula 1 campaign in a decade. For the eight-time constructors’ champion so accustomed to success, its latest embarrassment of riches instead arrived with a litany of performance problems that still weren’t fully resolved come the Abu Dhabi finale. As such, when Lewis Hamilton and George Russell dive into the pits next year, they’ll need to remember to park two garages further down following the Three-Pointed Star’s fall to third in the standings.

This regression coincided with Red Bull rediscovering its double-title-winning form upon the return of ground-effects to F1. While Adrian Newey and his design department must contend with a 25% slash in windtunnel time (the ‘reward’ for claiming the crown plus the punishment for breaching the 2021 cost cap) over the coming 12 months, the seismic rule change with the potential to reset the competitive order has been and gone. During the next few seasons of comparative aerodynamic stability, there’s good reason to expect Red Bull to build on its recent 17-race-winning pomp.

Ferrari, meanwhile, has not long blown its best bet of ending a championship drought dating back to 2008. Poor pitstops, shambolic strategy and major unreliability that left the engines to be turned down for the second half of 2022 means confidence in the Maranello operation has taken a sizeable blow. All told, for an audience and series bosses who crave a multi-team grudge match next year, Mercedes might again be the prime candidate to take the fight to Red Bull.

For one, the Russell-Hamilton pairing is arguably the strongest on the grid. They have every chance of nicking points off a more lopsided Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez line-up so long as they are presented with a machine that’s up to the job. Considering Mercedes is the only team to definitively get the better of Red Bull since 2010, that’s far from an impossible task. So, all eyes will be on the Silver Arrows’ powers of recovery.

Brackley would quite happily see the door hit the W13 on the way out. “I don’t ever plan to drive this one again,” says Hamilton of the troubled creation. Similarly, Toto Wolff reckons it will be better off “in the caves” rather than proudly on display in the Mercedes-Benz Museum in Stuttgart. Their no-love-lost attitude reflects a campaign-long battle with bone-shaking bouncing, extreme drag, rock-hard suspension, and a machine that had a Goldilocks-like relationship with tyres – it couldn’t heat them in the cold and chewed them when it was hot. These are the issues that must be resolved for the W14.

Hamilton has no interest in climbing aboard the troublesome W13 again

Photo by: Erik Junius

The new car will need to take an estimated step forward of 0.55 seconds per lap to be a regular race-winning force at the start of 2023. That is, after the last W13 upgrade package that debuted in October’s United States GP, Mercedes held an average deficit over the final four rounds of 0.613%. This is according to the ‘supertime’ metric, which records each team’s fastest lap during a weekend. Over a 90-second lap, that equates to over half a second. Still, technical director Mike Elliott reckons eroding that fully is “within the bounds of what’s possible”.

And closing that would not be unprecedented for Mercedes. It has overturned a hole that cavernous twice before. Come the climax of a 2012 term that featured the first win and pole of the marque’s modern era, it had improved by 0.834% on 2011. Then, more obviously, it found 0.986% between Hamilton joining the team for 2013 and the end of the first year of the 1600cc turbo-hybrid engines. While the latter relied on a landmark rule change that isn’t available this time, the squad nevertheless has pedigree in cultivating a phoenix-like revival.

To attempt to do similar for 2023 started with Mercedes diagnosing why last season went so wrong. The whispers in the factory ahead of testing was that the design team had crafted another world-beater. That optimism soon shattered when the W13 hit the track, particularly in the Bahrain test. Something in the data didn’t add up. The simulations didn’t predict the return of a violent porpoising sensation many thought had been left in the 1980s.

“[I] don’t think you can truly, now or even across the winter, state that we know everything about the W13. Across the year we learned and discovered a whole series of new items that really, we had to learn, understand, and develop very quickly” James Vowles

Mercedes’ potentially class-leading peak downforce numbers were generated when the scale model of the W13 was simulated running as low to the ground as possible. This was enhanced by running a floor that could flex to help seal the underside. Fine on paper, but the windtunnel runs couldn’t replicate the 140mph-plus speeds at which porpoising started to occur. Similarly, the flat rolling road surface couldn’t simulate all the real-world lumps and bumps of a circuit. As such, the bouncing came as a shock and a bendy floor was then the last thing the car needed. So much so that Mercedes sported connecting rods to try to fix it in place.

“As a team, we’ve had years of brilliant correlation between the windtunnel and the track,” says trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin. “You’ve probably got to go back almost a decade for when we made a part in carbon that we didn’t run on the race car. So, we got to the stage with update kits that we’d just bolt it on, and it would do exactly what was required. That had served us well. At the time we were making the decisions for W13, we didn’t see a reason to change that way of working.

Shovlin says Mercedes had been used to years of "brilliant" correlation between its windtunnel and the track

Photo by: FIA Pool

“Here, the issue wasn’t so much our windtunnel, but there was a mechanism at play that we hadn’t captured in any of our modelling or any of our work. That was porpoising. So, there were two things you had to do. One is that you’ve got to engineer it out of the car, which was fairly painful from a point of view of the distraction, the finite resource that we’ve got in a cost cap… And then, subsequently, how you develop the tools you need to be able to get back to where we were – where we could just commit to making a set of parts, bring them to the car and have confidence that they work.”

To answer that, as soon as the process of taming the W13 began, so too did implementing safeguarding measures for 2023. Much like Hamilton sacrificing his free practice sessions to run radical set-ups when an eighth title looked out of reach, the team was working with a longer-term view. It wasn’t going to get bogged down chasing the diminishing returns the season offered. As Shovlin says, under the cost cap, no one can blindly spend their way out of trouble. Mercedes couldn’t follow a conventional development path of bringing continual upgrades until the shortfalls were resolved. The financial restrictions were exacerbated by porpoising, which kept wrecking the floors. That means investment has been directed to fundamentally “crack the code… for future performance”.

The team is coy on whether it fully troubleshot its temperamental challenger over the 22 rounds. In his Abu Dhabi debrief, motorsport strategy director James Vowles reckoned: “[I] don’t think you can truly, now or even across the winter, state that we know everything about the W13. Across the year we learned and discovered a whole series of new items that really, we had to learn, understand, and develop very quickly.

“There have been some ups and downs. Very much so. And that’s the part of what I meant by this car has items that we believe we understand and some of them that are still not fully explained. But if you look at the direction moving forward, the gaps to the front, especially on race pace, we made huge amounts of progress. You only do that by understanding where your problems are, working on them and working as a team.”

In this mission to bounce back, the regulations for 2023 have potentially come towards Mercedes, the worst afflicted of the ‘big three’ by porpoising. In response to the extreme vertical oscillations that notably left Hamilton to gingerly extricate himself from the cockpit after 51 laps of Baku, during the summer the FIA announced that the floor edge will be raised by 15mm for next year. While that will help curtail the pogoing problem for Merc, it does mean ripping up its originally conceived concept for a car to run slammed into the ground. But Wolff won’t lose sleep over that. He says of its successor: “The DNA of the car is going to change for next year, that’s clear. It doesn’t necessarily mean that our bodywork is going to look very different [see the size-zero sidepods] but certainly, the architecture will change.”

Mercedes' porpoising problems were among their worst in Azerbaijan

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

Should the rule tweaks and the design rethink make porpoising a thing of the past, it can next help Mercedes refine its granite-like ride. Hamilton says the car has been hampered by “global stiffness to the point where the suspension is pretty useless”. He reckons there was more give in the sidewalls of the new 23-inch Pirellis than what springs and dampers could offer. That extra force through the rubber meant it too was bouncing independently of the porpoising to provide an unwelcome double whammy.

Refining the suspension set-up and geometry is also one of the possible fixes for those tyre warm-up woes that blighted qualifying in anything less than scorching heat. Therefore, given one flaw of the W13 has contributed in part to the others, should Brackley find a root fix, it could be looking at the best kind of snowball effect over the winter.

Russell’s triumphs in both the sprint and full GP contest in Brazil have only added to the motivation for the off-season. “The factory is going to be pumping on all cylinders across the winter and everybody’s going to be so motivated to come back,” says the now-victorious Brit. “The result is such a morale booster for everyone, and what we really needed to keep on pushing. The targets we’ve set out are absolutely the right ones. We just need to continue on this path that we’re on and see what we can achieve next year.”

“We were fighting with Alfa Romeo and Haas at the start of the season and well over a second, at points, behind Ferrari, who were looking the most dominant team at the time. It really goes to show the improvement we’ve made” George Russell

While the gestation period for the W14 has long since started, aerodynamic drag continued to blight Mercedes right until the last dance in Abu Dhabi. It was 6mph slower in the speed traps than the Red Bull. The high altitude of Mexico City and an absence of properly long straights at Interlagos served to only mask the shortcoming. Definitively rectifying that excessive air resistance will be high on the Christmas wish list.

When major straights returned at Yas Marina, Russell qualified down in sixth, 0.687s adrift of polesitter Verstappen. “We’re just not efficient enough,” he explained. “That’s the long and short of it. Every time we come to these kinds of circuits, where you have a full range of corners and long straights, we really struggle. We just lose so much speed to Red Bull on the straights. So, it’s clear where we need to improve for next year if we want to have a car that’s stronger over the course of a season.”

Abu Dhabi was tricky for Mercedes, as long straights were back

Photo by: Carl Bingham / Motorsport Images

Hamilton adds: “Drag is a huge problem for us. When we get to a certain speed, that’s when other people are pulling away. It’s when you brake, and the front dips and the rear comes up and the aero transfers during that period and when you get on the power. It’s different between low and high-speed. So many problems.”

Further suggesting the W13’s defects fed into one another, Mercedes often tried to remove downforce to lower the drag. This, it hoped, wouldn’t leave it as a sitting duck down the straights. But, in turn, it ruined the rest of a lap when the going got twisty. And with that reduced downforce not pressing the tyres into the surface, heating those Pirellis took even longer. Ultimately, this cocktail left Mercedes down the order in qualifying and then unable to regain places on Sunday.

Here, at least Mercedes can reap the benefit of dropping two places in the points. Under the sliding scale of the Aerodynamic Testing Regulations, the annus horribilis will afford it 7% more windtunnel runs than Ferrari, while Red Bull faces its own one-quarter slash.

Despite the headaches enduring until the Abu Dhabi curtain call, that’s not to say that the team didn’t make significant progress throughout the year. Certainly, when Hamilton was binned out of Q1 in Saudi Arabia, forecasting a win at Sao Paulo for his stablemate would have seemed like a flight of fancy. Asked to stick a number on how much time was found, Russell supposes: “Definitely well over a second, I would say. In Bahrain [round one] I qualified ninth. At Imola, both Lewis and I were out in Q2. We were fighting with Alfa Romeo and Haas at the start of the season and well over a second, at points, behind Ferrari, who were looking the most dominant team at the time. It really goes to show the improvement we’ve made. We lost so much time trying to solve the porpoising issues and that really hurt our development. I think that’s why we’re seeing such a jump in performance in these [final] races. We’re now focused on bringing performance.”

One area where Mercedes has already found joy is with stripping weight out of the car. Not in a conventional sense like Red Bull, which put the RB18 on a diet so it could near the minimum 798kg limit to give bias to the front axle to suit Verstappen’s driving style. Instead, the “slimmer” Merc enabled the team to add more parts back on to remedy aero troubles, rather than turning it into a true featherweight. As Wolff says when asked about the final Austin upgrade that delivered new front and rear wings and a tweaked floor: “The weight was a recurring issue this season. Obviously, you’re trimming it and you lose weight, but then you’re adding parts in order to recover downfalls and issues that we had. So, we never got back to the weight. We’ve been pretty stable over the last few races. Not where we expect to be, but certainly there’s some lap time that we should find for next year.”

Wolff describes Mercedes as being "eight to 10 months" behind on its performance development schedule in 2022

Photo by: Gareth Harford / Motorsport Images

Undoubtedly, there have been steps forward. But it is also evident that the immediate and enduring quest to eradicate porpoising put Mercedes on the back foot. So much so that Wolff reckons the team was “eight to 10 months” behind with its usual performance development schedule. Even if the programme for the W14 has been in the works for some time, closing that would be quite the comeback over the winter. And that’s only the challenge the team faces to catch up to where it planned to be. It must also match the gains that Ferrari and Red Bull themselves will make.

And in this perfect world where Mercedes is ready to hit the ground running with its latest creation, its on-track operations still need a little bit of tightening if Red Bull is going to truly feel the heat. During the peak Silver Arrows years, it infrequently excelled with strategy but often didn’t face the opposition to make that pay. In 2022, its overzealous call to not pit Hamilton during the late safety car in the Dutch GP, or the excessive caution in fitting the hard tyres to both drivers to squander a shot at success in Mexico, suggest the pitwall remains imperfect.

Regardless, this is one optimistic camp. Mercedes insists the toils of the season just gone have improved and bonded the entire squad so that, when it’s back on song, it’ll potentially be slicker than ever. Then there’s Hamilton, who says he is ready to sign a contract extension right away rather than wait to see how the early rounds of 2023 unfold. That’s a huge vote of confidence.

Perhaps most tellingly, the hints that the good times will return are reflected across the more deadpan engineering team. Vowles says: “The confidence we have is that we now have our windtunnel tools, our development tools, our performance tools here in the organisation producing performance which is more than our competitors. It’s allowing us to move further forward relative to them.

“There is still a void, though, and Abu Dhabi really showed that. That has to be caught up across the winter. We have a very good process and system in place to do that. The development you saw across the season will continue across the winter and I think we’ll be in a very strong place next year.”

If that truly is the case, the Red Bull monopoly that eventually played out in 2022 might be short-lived. Mercedes reckons it’s game on.

Mercedes wants to see the number one board more regularly again in 2023

Photo by: Andy Hone / Motorsport Images