The journey through the desert has been long and hard for a Mercedes that seems to finally understand how to fine-tune a W13 that has given them real headaches in each of the circuits visited on the calendar.
The eyes of each and every one of the teams on the grid were drawn to a single point when the new generation of single-seaters landed in Bahrain after the misnamed shake down initial in Barcelona: the Mercedes W13a truly innovative single-seater as it barely incorporates pontoons compared to the designs of its rivals.
It was also then that many of the fans feared that, like the YOU GIVE In previous years, those commanded by Toto Wolff would have come up with a truly unique approach that would give them an enormous advantage… but nothing is further from the truth.
“If you had told me that we were going to put a floor in the car that we have not tested, I would have told you that we were never going to do this”
Despite of podium Lewis Hamilton in the opening race and George Russell’s 4th place, favored by the double abandonment of Red Bull to a certain extent, the road for Mercedes has been long and pointed until they managed to understand, at least partially, a car that did not respond to the the same way to the simulated tests as when jumping on the track.
groping
“This season we have unconventional things», acknowledged Toto Wolff about the development of a car that has been difficult to fine-tune. «I remember I had a talk with a very smart girl on aerodynamics; she told me ‘If you had told me last year that we were going to put a floor in the car that we haven’t tested in the wind tunnel, she would have told you that we were never going to do this.’
keep design Original has been the option finally chosen, but there were moments in the season when the results made him not even rule out going back to the model presented at the Circuit, with pontoons more similar to the rest.
«We did it and everyone was proud of the results. It’s the same every weekend, we try things,” Wolff acknowledged, conceding that at each Grand Prix they continue to explore the limits of an easily distinguishable single-seater.
“The source is databases, but if you can’t trust the data because there’s no correlation between the virtual world, the wind tunnelthe CFDs and the simulations and what happens in real time on the track, you just have to test things and try to find a correlation… basically reverse engineering the correlation, “explained Wolff.
lack of correlation of the data when passing from the wind tunnel to the asphalt of a real circuit is one of the biggest problems that a team can have in Formula 1 today, a greater evil that the German team has been minimizing. “This is what we have done, and we have had positive results,” he concluded.
Font: GPfans.com