Why the painful process of Mercedes’ F1 B-spec shift isn’t over yet

“I’m of the belief that this car is now a solid baseline. There’s no more talk about changing regulations, raising the floor edges, and the bouncing is a non-existent topic. It is from there now we can seek performance and downforce.”

It’s taken long enough. Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has spent the past 18 months enduring the consequences of his team’s single-minded pursuit of a radical, nearly sidepod-less design direction. One of the key questions now is whether the most successful team of the past decade can make up for that lost time.

At launch, 2022’s W13 seemed like a typical piece of swagger from a team confident in its engineering capabilities; instead, Mercedes spent much of that season tinkering with the car simply to get it to stop porpoising, an issue many rivals had already seen off. By year’s end it seemed Mercedes had tamed the car to an extent – it still ‘bounced’ and was unpredictable under braking – but victories in the sprint and grand prix at Interlagos suggested to many, team included, that there was runway in the ‘zeropod’ concept once debugged.

Except it didn’t quite work out like that. Before the new season had even begun last March, Mercedes had to face the uncomfortable truth that pursuing the concept had been a mistake, that it was a dead end, and the W14 would be a bust without a total rethink. GP Racing summed up the mood music coming out of the team by running an image of the W14 going through
 a shredder on the cover of the May issue. And how apt that was, for Mercedes had already
 begun work on wide-reaching changes we’re
 only now beginning to see.

The flurry of upgrades had been planned long before technical director Mike Elliott and chief technical officer James Allison performed the job swap which put Allison back in charge of frontline development. A new bodywork package and floor was pencilled in for the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix at Imola. The race’s cancellation due to heavy flooding in Northern Italy pushed this introduction back to Monaco; hardly the ideal test bed for such a crucial array of updates, but they were already fully ensconced in the W14’s DNA
 by then. Mercedes was not about to back out of
 its dramatic U-turn.

Mercedes finally ditched its 'zeropod' philosophy for the Monaco GP

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Taking the pain


In GP Racing's May cover feature Pat Symonds outlined how easy it is to pursue a particular design direction because individuals have become heavily invested in its success. It’s the engineering equivalent of what logicians call the sunk cost fallacy: doggedly following an unsuccessful course of action because a great deal of time, effort and resources have gone into it, when abandoning it would be for the greater good. It’s a sign of Mercedes’ strengths that it has recognised this and changed course (albeit a little late).

Teams have converged around what appears to be the best sidepod solution: Red Bull’s downwashing arrangement. Even Ferrari has swallowed its pride. Mercedes was no different by the time it rocked up on the Côte d’Azur, developing its own concoction with more conventional cooling inlets and a clear downwards ramp on the upper surface. It came as little surprise Mercedes would choose to follow this philosophy, since it has already conceded that the zeropod’s potential was illusory.

PLUS: How Mercedes' new F1 upgrades fared in Monaco

“For us it was just that was where we saw the most opportunity and we went down that route,” explains trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin. “There were elements of it [the zeropod] that were useful, but you can’t fully understand the benefits of another concept unless you put it on the tunnel and you work on it for months. It was just that sort of acceptance that we’ve had a good go at [the old] concept. It’s good in a sense that we’ve taken that pain [of switching] now.”

The wishbone positions have been redefined to not only improve the local flow patterns, but also assist with the distribution of loading to improve the stability of the floor

While they comprise the most visible part of the design philosophy, the sidepods are merely a conduit for the rest of the aerodynamics to work properly, helping to produce the requisite airflow patterns around the car needed to ensure that every aerodynamic device works as intended. Changing the bodywork doesn’t suddenly transform the fortunes of a design on its own, but rather offers a symbolic change of direction that Mercedes feels can bear more easily harvestable fruit. Hence Wolff’s claim that the revised W14 offers a “new baseline” to work from.

Of the visible floor changes along the edge, Mercedes had introduced a more pronounced
 lip and a longer slot in its efforts to build a
 seal around the floor’s edge, fulfilling the job
 of the skirts featured on the older generation
 of ground effect cars. Where the old sidepods featured a predominant inwash characteristic
 to enhance the “Coke bottle” section at the
 rear of the car, the downward direction of the airflow with the new design brings it to the 
upper surface of the diffuser.

This all integrates with the new front suspension package, where the wishbone positions have been redefined to not only improve the local flow patterns, but also assist with the distribution of loading to improve the stability of the floor. This is an area where Red Bull has excelled within the new regulations, having understood that a car with a minimal amount of dive and roll during the cornering phases ensures that there are no sudden fluctuations in downforce through the high-speed corners. 

Hamilton took a first pole position of F1's ground effect era in Hungary last time out, but faded in the race

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images

How the budget cap affected the change

The current W14 is in essence a B-spec car, even if Mercedes hasn’t delineated between the two versions formally, and a remarkable amount of work has gone into making the overhaul possible despite the limitations placed on it by the cost-cap regulations. Pre-cap, outfits with large budgets could afford to throw money at problems with little regard for the overall expenditure. But the current limit of around $140m per year forces even the wealthiest teams to prioritise which upgrade packages make it through the pipeline.

This also affects the time it takes to make things happen; the fewer resources available, the longer it takes to move a project to completion. Regardless, Mercedes attempted to fast-track them as much as it could, even forgoing some of the more granular analyses to get the designs signed off and parts built.

“The cost cap gives so many constraints,” Wolff explained before the upgrades were introduced. “In the past, we wouldn’t even know what a front suspension costs; today, we need to take the purchase price of the aluminium and factor in how much the machining of it costs, how much do you need to write off from the aluminium that you don’t need, price out every bolt that goes into the suspension, the carbon that you bought as the raw material, then cut it and put it on...

“What is the energy cost of the composite room, and the overhead that goes into it? This is super complex, and it’s gone so far that we have cost analysts 
and engineers to decide whether buying that kilogram of aluminium is worth the performance gain on the other side.

“That process is so difficult and painful; people that should be creative only and have carte blanche, they can’t do it because somebody is telling them if it’s feasible in the cost cap or not. If we were free, we’d probably bring double the amount of upgrades.”

Working with the existing chassis had its own limitations, particularly since the homologated and structural parts couldn’t be easily changed. For example, Mercedes had previously housed one of its side-impact structures within an extended mirror mount, and had to retain the impact structure’s position and sculpt the new sidepods around it.

The radiators and other internals could, however, be shuffled around to accept the new inlet position, as the wider sidepods created space to optimise their placement. Again, this doesn’t simply yield a purely aerodynamic effect, it influences the centre of gravity height. In turn, that affects the suspension loading, so this must also be considered in the new suspension package. No upgrade exists in solitude.

Feedback from both Lewis Hamilton and George Russell has been positive, both echoing Wolff’s claim that, although not the finished package by any stretch, it has at least set the team on the right path. In particular, both drivers struggled with feedback on corner entry and front-end stability at the apex of the corner, and the signs are that this has been rectified. The car still isn’t where the drivers want it, but it at least imbues them with more confidence at the wheel.



Shovlin acknowledges that shifting car concept is a painful process and this isn't over yet

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

More pain is coming

Even if the budget for upgrades were unlimited, the W14 would reach a performance ceiling. When a car is designed to a different series of parameters, new developments in a different direction will require some compromise. In other words, the full effect of Mercedes’ findings won’t be apparent until 2024’s W15 breaks cover.

In that, there’s a few key areas where the drivers have been clamouring for improvement, particularly in the realms of low-speed performance and in making the rear end as stable as the front now is. Hamilton sums it up best, feeling that although the team was making progress in that area, the overall characteristics of the W14 were still similar pre- and post-upgrade – something that inherently wasn’t going to help the drivers topple Red Bull in the short-term.

“We’ve got a lot of work to do just to add rear downforce to the car and a little bit more efficiency. But we’re chipping away,” he says. “In truth, it doesn’t feel a huge difference to the beginning of the year. There are some elements of the car which do feel different, but it’s just simply having a little bit more downforce on the car. But the characteristics of the car are very, very similar to what we had earlier on in the year.

"Changing concept is a fairly painful process. You lose development time just to get back to where you were" Andrew Shovlin

“For the next year’s car, you need to take a lot of these different things off and change them. It’s definitely not, characteristic-wise, the car that’s going to be able to beat the Red Bull just yet. And so, we’ve got to work on that.”

Hamilton also believes Mercedes needs to “take its eye off the ball” with the current car at some point to start optimising its new car concept around the knowledge gleaned from the newer specification of the W14. Red Bull has already started its switchover to next year’s car. That said, the simulations and development work that continue to influence the W14 are being carried out with a view to 2024, and the data collected over the remainder of the season will also feed into the W15’s gestation period.

“Changing concept is a fairly painful process,” Shovlin says. “You lose development time just to get back to where you were. We’ve taken that pain now, and the benefits of what we’ve done well are going to come more in the future. In the next weeks and months and carrying into the next car, that’s where you would really expect to see that.”

Arguably, Mercedes now sits where it should have begun 2022, although it’s easy to make that claim with hindsight. Plotting a direction which doesn’t take it down another development cul-de-sac is going to be crucial if it is to challenge Red Bull again – and not fall even further behind.

There is plenty of reason to be optimistic at Mercedes, but it knows there is plenty of work still to do

Photo by: Zak Mauger / Motorsport Images