Betteridge’s Law tells us that any headline ending in a question mark can be answered with the word “no.” That should be it then, right?
But this one though, I’m not so sure.
On one level, for the team that won the last seven Constructor’s titles in a row, anything other than double World Championships every year has got to be considered a disappointment. Although two Grands Prix do remain before the offseason, with both 2022 titles long gone to their rivals in Milton Keynes, it seems an appropriate time to offer a premature postmortem for the Silver Arrows’ 2022.
Despite what certain now-iconic (and now-deleted) tweets may have predicted in advance of preseason testing, the Mercedes-AMG ‘zeropod’ concept did not prove fruitful for the unlucky chassis W13. Despite the record books showing a podium result for Lewis Hamilton the first time out in Bahrain, both Mercedes were well off the pace of the leading Ferraris and Red Bulls. Hamilton only earned that third-place result due to late DNFs for both of the Bulls.
An unlikely 183rd podium for Lewis Hamilton in Bahrain 🏆#BahrainGP #F1 https://t.co/NoHfDrIYAw
— Formula 1 (@F1) March 20, 2022
It took until the Hungarian Grand Prix for Mercedes’ first pole position. It came at the hands of young hotshoe George Russell, the Briton able to lead the team’s first laps of the season just before the summer break but eventually fell out of the podium places. Seven-time champion Hamilton didn’t lead a lap under green until the United States Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas, one race after Max Verstappen mathematically clinched the drivers’ title.
Honestly, what more is there to say? The W13 is slow in a straight line compared to its rivals and, to mix animal metaphors, porpoised like a bucking bronco at the start of the year — referring to the car’s propensity to repeatedly stall its new-for-2022 underfloor aerodynamics on the straights. Hamilton revealed ahead of the Canadian Grand Prix in June that the repeated impacts, sometimes as high as 10G, were giving him headaches.
To the team’s credit, the Silver Arrows have come achingly close to victory on multiple occasions, notably in Hungary, the Netherlands and Texas, although they thrice lost out to Verstappen and Red Bull. Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez was supposed to be the team’s best shot, as the altitude of the Mexico City venue tends to minimize the performance difference between engines. But once…
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