Mercedes is engaged in a long and tiring journey to close the gap to the front. Since the introduction of ground-effect cars, the Brackley team has been several steps behind their rivals. Red Bull, Ferrari and McLaren are all comfortably faster at this stage. There have been several changes in direction within Toto Wolff’s team. After many false dawns, as repeated several times by the Team Principal himself, Mercedes believes they are on the right path. This confidence comes from some important decisions taken by the technicians directed by James Allison.
One notable change has been reverting to an old front-wing specification. Among other small incremental adjustments, the aim is to make the W15 a more balanced car.
THE NEW FRONT WING CORRECTS THE BALANCE PROBLEMS THAT EMERGED WITH THE INNOVATIVE DESIGN OF THE ‘LAUNCH SPEC’.
At the beginning of 2024, the car designed by James Allison and his team was generating plenty of noise. Toto Wolff was proud of the car’s aggressive design and the many innovations it brought to the track. However, once it went to the track, the W15’s limitations became clear. Still, the 2024 Mercedes challenger initially alarmed rivals – with teams asking for clarification on the legality of their new front wing.
However, as often happens in Formula 1, complaints went away once the front failed to deliver performance. Recently in Monaco, Mercedes themselves abandoned the concept, presenting a more conventional front wing.
“That design is part of the past,” said technical director James Allison.
“It allowed us to create discontinuities in a wing that the rules required to be relatively continuous. This design allowed us to bring more air downstream of the front wing, but when we rebalanced the car, we found ourselves with more front load than we needed.”
It appears between the two wings used in Monaco by Mercedes – Illustration by Rosario Giuliana
We have spoken extensively about Mercedes’ lack of correlation between the tunnel and the track. There was a big discrepancy in load values between the simulator and the track. This was forcing Mercedes into undesirable counterbalancing measures to resolve the issue. Because of this, the German constructor is using a new front wing on the W15.
“This wing is simply better than the previous one. Over time, you find better solutions, and what you thought was fantastic, in the end, is no longer fantastic.”
One of the problems that most afflicted Mercedes was the occurrence of chronic understeer, often at low speeds, as Lewis Hamilton complained several times:
“You can work to remove understeer at low speeds or oversteer at high speeds with mechanical modifications, but this will make the car more difficult for the driver. The objective is to remove this aerodynamic problem and have less extreme mechanics and a more coherent and predictable car”
ALLISON: “THE MORE LOAD IT PRODUCES, THE HARDER THE CAR IS TO DRIVE. RED BULL TOOK A STEP BACK, WE TOOK ONE STEP FORWARD.”
Toto Wolff’s renewed confidence is partly due to James Allison’s observation. Lewis Hamilton recently revealed Allison’s confidence about the upgrades arriving on the W15. The next batch of upgrades from Mercedes will be tasked with resolving the car’s balance.
The new front wing is the first part of these solutions and has allowed the team to take a small step forward. Here in Canada, the seven-time world champion will also have it at his disposal.
“These cars, and especially these very large wings, like to stay very close to the ground. But the closer they get to the ground, the more nervous the car becomes because the balance shifts forward more than you want,” explains James Allison.
In fact, the trend since 2022 has been that wings move closer to the ground. This has led to an increasingly nervous behaviour of the single-seaters, as the English engineer explained.
Allison explained in more detail that Mercedes have struggled to find the right balance at a wide range of speeds. Both high and low-speed corners have given the team headaches.
As analysed several times, the W15 has a rather small operating window. This is why Mercedes struggles so much at circuits that require a compromise in set-up. However, James Allison believes this dilemma is being addressed:
“Now we are better than two races ago, and we hope in two races to be better than today,” Allison outlined.
The Mercedes technical director also indulged in some analysis of Red Bull and the RB20:
“I think that Red Bull will be strong again when it is necessary to bring a lot of speed into corners. But their updates so far seem to have been a downgrade. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and continue to work to improve.”
