Mercedes revert to older-spec floor for F1 Azerbaijan GP Ahead of this weekend’s Azerbaijan Grand Prix, Pit Debrief has learned Mercedes will return to the floor they ran pre-sumner break as balance issues have affected the W15 in recent weeks.
A tricky start to the season saw the team fail to finish in the top 3 in a race until Montreal. A series of updates from Miami through to Canada allowed George Russell and Lewis Hamilton to start regularly challenging for podiums, and even victories on pure pace.
Following poles at Canada and Great Britain, victories at Austria, Silverstone and Belgium, as well six consecutive podiums from Canada to Spa, the Brackley-based team introduced a new floor to try and add more performance to the car.
However, Friday at the iconic Belgian track had been a disaster for the team with the new floor. Russell and Hamilton finished P6 and P10 respectively in FP2, over a second off the pace.
They took it off and went back to the previous one that had been working very well. On race day, they finished 1-2 on the road as Russell fended off Hamilton. Ultimately the younger Brit was disqualified as the car was underweight, handing the 39-year-old his second win in three races. Hamilton had been controlling things throughout, until Russell tried a daring 1-stop.
The new floor was put back on at Zandvoort and Monza, and it is safe to say the W15 has not been as quick. Although George Russell qualified on the second row at both events, the race pace was simply not as strong as it had been before the summer break.
Mercedes looked to be the fourth quickest car in Zandvoort as tyre degradation hampered Russell in particular, and they ended up finishing P7 and P8 in the end. At Monza, Lewis Hamilton brought it home in P5, with Russell P7 after his first lap error.
However, McLaren and Ferrari had the pace on them at the Italian venue.
While the new floor has given them more load, the car has become more difficult to drive as the balance has become unpredictable once again, and that negative is outweighing the benefits of the load.
It’s also part of the teams plan to figure out if anything else could be responsible for their loss of performance in The Netherlands and Italy as they look to nail future upgrades, and to make sure they put themselves in a strong position for the upcoming 2025 campaign.
Development in the ground effect era has been extremely tricky. 2024 has seen multiple teams bring upgrades, only for them to find out it doesn’t correspond with what the numbers are suggesting when they hit the track.
For example, Ferrari experienced bouncing when they introduced a new floor in Barcelona.
Such is the sensitive nature of these cars, McLaren team boss Andrea Stella admitted in a written media session after qualifying in Monza that they have decided not to introduce a new floor for the time being.
“You know there’s a reason why we haven’t brought some upgrades, because we see that as we press the go button we might have had some doubts when these parts were tested on full scale on the real car.
“So, we are taking our time to convince ourselves that the development is mature [enough] to be taken trackside. This is what I can say about the way we are working.
“I think the evolution of these cars has led to some challenging flow physics and I think that’s where other teams including McLaren are kind of struggling to easily generate developments.”
Lewis Hamilton said on Thursday in his media session that tests would take place to try and solve the issue.
“I think there’s lots of question marks on a lot of it. I think we’re just trying to understand it.
“There could be a number of things. It could be track dependent. It could be the upgrade. My gut’s telling me it’s the upgrade.
“It’s hard to see the difference between the two. We’re going to try this weekend to roll back on some of it and see whether or not we can spot it.
“There’s a lot of work going on just to analyse it, because it gives the team a direction of where they’re going in development. Not only this car, but for next year as well.”
George Russell also discussed it.
“The upgrade wasn’t a substantial performance improvement and sometimes you’ve got to look at things just objectively.
“We brought a new floor, we dropped in performance and that was the main thing that changed. We knew the upgrade wasn’t going to set the world on fire, it was just another step in the direction that we’d been pursuing.
“Reversing back to the pre-Spa iteration of floor, if everything were to be absolutely correct on paper, it’s a small delta. I think it’s better the devil we know sometimes.
“We know what that floor offers, we know exactly where the set-up needs to be and sometimes with a new upgrade it takes a number of races to learn and understand.”
