Mercedes believe the cause of their car’s poor performance in high-speed corners is something fundamental to its design.
The team’s drivers found it difficult to stay close to their rivals through the quickest corners at the Jeddah Corniche Circuit last weekend.
“Fundamentally the limitations that we had in qualifying and the race, they were broadly the same for both,” said Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin in a video published by the team. “So it’s telling you it’s not a small difference, it’s not a tiny bit of camber or a spring or bar here and there, it’s something more fundamental that we need to dig into and understand.”
The team has identified three main reasons why their car couldn’t keep up with the competition in the quickest corners.
“One of them was the balance wasn’t great,” said Shovlin. “So those very fast corners [where] the walls aren’t particularly far away [are] the ones where the driver wants a lot of confidence and quite often we were snapping to oversteer if they really leant on the tyres. You can easily imagine how unsettling that is for the for the drivers. That was a factor in qualifying and the race.
“In qualifying we were also suffering a bit with the bouncing. That was less of a problem in the race: There’s more fuel in the car, you’re going a bit slower and that seemed to calm it down and it wasn’t such an issue.
“Then the big one is we don’t really have enough grip there. So that’s one of the things that we are working hard on this week because Melbourne has a similar nature of corners. We’re doing a lot of work to try and understand why did we not seem to have the grip of some of our close competitors.”
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He believes Lewis Hamilton and George Russell were losing “around three or fourth tenths” of a second per lap to their rivals through the quickest corners. However the team are unwilling to risk sacrificing its car’s strengths to address its key weakness.
“We were actually one of the fastest cars, if not the fastest car, in a straight line,” said Shovlin. “So we’re on quite a light wing level and what we could do is slow ourselves down in sector two and three to try and recover a bit of that time in sector one.
“But ideally we’d like to keep that and work out a way to try and improve sector one by means other than just putting a load more downforce on the car and then paying the price for it…
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