Mercedes had to sacrifice a significant amount of aerodynamic performance to understand the problems with the 2022 car, according to technical director Mike Elliott.

This year saw the end of eight consecutive constructors' championships for Mercedes. Because of new regulations, the Brackley-based team struggled to get the most out of the car. The biggest culprit was the phenomenon of porpoising which the team could not get under control. "Bahrain performance-wise we looked OK", Elliott said in conversation with Racer. The Mercedes top executive continued that the team made the most progress in Barcelona where his racing stable gave up much of its wind tunnel performance to try to greatly reduce bouncing. "I think what we saw in Barcelona was a car that we could now run where we wanted to run it in terms of ride height, but we had given up a lot of aero performance to get there.”

Highlight

After Barcelona, there were more challenging races for Mercedes, but Elliott says the problems that followed were better understood and addressed. "We got through Barcelona, had the sort of high of Barcelona feeling that we got good performance", he said. Then other problems occurred with the car where it took Mercedes a long time to recover from them. According to Elliott, it takes quite a long time to understand these cars like this and deliver the performance.

It seemed throughout the season that all the updates the team brought were a small step in the right direction. "By Austin we’d got to a car that, for me, wasn’t beating Red Bull but it at least put us in a sensible position and in a position where we could say that our development had moved us in the right direction and give us some confidence with what we are doing for the future."

Learning year

Finally, Elliott thinks the reaction to the one-two at the Brazilian Grand Prix shows how motivated Mercedes is to get back to competing at the front after such a long period of success. The Mercedes top man is therefore also keen to quote a wisdom of the now deceased Niki Lauda: "You learn more from failure than you do success. And I think this has been a massive learning year for us."