The team revealed that weaknesses that had resulted in less than a decade of competitive performance with the Mercedes W13 were discovered during the car’s first run.
The W13 debuted at Silverstone on February 18. Lewis Hamilton and George Russell drove the car for the first time that day.
The team’s head of trackside operations, Andrew Shovlin, confirmed that the team realized the W13 was not performing as well as they had hoped.
“To be honest, the signs were there very, very early in the race, even on the day we filmed at Silverstone,” Shovlin said in a video released by the team.
The depth of the team’s problems became clear during the three days of testing at the Sector de Catalunya and the Bahrain International Circuit.
“Then we went to Barcelona for three days and the car was not that competitive,” Shovlin recalled. But we have been waiting for a big update to bring to Bahrain. This was the point at which we realized we had a serious problem with the Bahrain Challenge.
Mercedes has unveiled their aggressive ‘Zero Sidepod’ design in Bahrain. “We put the upgrade kit on it and it just didn’t make the car go faster,” Shovlin said. “Now, it’s been an exciting year since then, but he’s had a lot of work to do to overcome these challenges.”
Returning to the Barcelona track for the Spanish Grand Prix in May, the team began making progress with the car. “That’s where we made the biggest step to get on the air and perform really well,” Shovlin said.
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But once we solved that problem, it made us realize that there were other problems with the car’s ride. It wasn’t great over the bumps and it gave us clarity to work on those next steps.
“From an education perspective, it was a very important improvement, even if it was just a small step in the right direction.”
After going almost the entire season without a race win, further improvements introduced by the team at the Circuit of the Americas gave Russell victory at Interlagos two rounds later.
Shovlin says the team now understands all the problems the 2022 design faced and will apply those to next year’s W14. “It’s fair to say that by the time you get to the end of the season, competing on different circuits, you should have a good understanding of all the issues and have a good understanding of them at the end of the year.
“Even though we had some problems with the car, they weren’t new problems that kept us competitive on some tracks, those were problems that we could anticipate and that have been there for a long time.
“Now, a big part of what’s been going on for the last few months is making sure the issues on the 13 don’t carry over to the 14. We’ve made good progress there and you can see it on some of those. The later updates, especially the updates we brought to Austin, have gotten us that much closer.”
A lot of our focus has been on making sure we can develop the upgrade kit, bring it to the track and see it translate into performance and hopefully the end of that work will mean we can have a more competitive package overall for next year. He said.
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