Trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin of Mercedes Formula 1 said that as they prepare for the Australian Grand Prix weekend, the team is planning “experiments” to address concerns regarding their 2024 package.
The car’s bouncing problem has been a major issue, particularly during qualifying when fuel levels are low, and its shortcomings in high-speed corners compared to others got brutally exposed in Saudi Arabia as Lewis Hamilton got left behind by Lando Norris in the final stint.
As the team continues to learn about the car, Shovlin says they will try experiments at the Australian Grand Prix next weekend to try and combat the difficulties.
“There’s definitely data that we’re picking through from Jeddah,” he said. “We’re also looking at data from the Bahrain race, Bahrain test, and we will come up with a plan for how we approach free practice in Melbourne. But it’s not just based on what we did in Jeddah.
“There’s a lot of work going on within the aerodynamics department, vehicle dynamics department.
“We’re trying to design some experiments there that will hopefully give us a direction that’s good for performance.”
As the team prepares for Australia, Shovlin claims improving high-speed corner performance is a top priority. According to him, there were a number of reasons that they struggled so much in Jeddah last weekend through the high-speed corners in the first sector.
“It’s a few things,” he said. “One of them was the balance wasn’t great. So those very fast corners, the walls aren’t particularly far away – so 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.
“And you can easily imagine how unsettling that is for the drivers. Now, 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 down, and wasn’t such an issue.
“And 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 similar nature of corners.
“So 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.”
Shovlin mentioned that that George Russell and Lewis Hamilton diverged in their set-ups in Saudi Arabia. The older Brit also went with a higher downforce rear wing in practice initially but reverted towards the lower one heading into qualifying.
“Some of that was they’d complained about bouncing,” he explained. “So we were looking at ways of trying to improve that. You can play with ride heights, you can play with stiffness, and that all seems effective.
“And also they were just trying to tune the balance through the speed range. So what’s the car like in the low-speed? What’s it like in the high-speed?”
“When you change things, you can see the differences.
“We can also look at the global performance of the two cars, but fundamentally, the limitations that we had in qualifying and the race, they were broadly the same for both.
“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.”
