What's behind Mercedes’ high-speed weakness? | ‘Experiments’ planned

Mercedes have explained what they believe was behind their poor performance in high-speed corners during the F1 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

After a challenging start to the 2024 season in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, Mercedes boss Toto Wolff admitted the team is battling a “fundamental” issue with their revamped W15 F1 car.

Mercedes’ high-speed weakness was exposed during the Jeddah weekend, leaving Lewis Hamilton feeling like he was “in a different category” compared to his rivals as he insisted “big changes” were needed to challenge Red Bull for wins this year.

“Fundamentally the limitations that we had in qualifying and the race, they were broadly the same for both,” Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin explained.

“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.”

When asked what caused the time loss in the high-speed corners, Shovlin replied: “It’s a few things. One of them was the balance wasn’t great.

“So those very fast corners [where] the walls aren’t particularly far away [are] 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. You can easily imagine how unsettling that is for the for the drivers. 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 it down and it wasn’t such an issue

“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 a similar nature of corners. 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 stressed Mercedes have no intention to sacrifice their strengths in other areas in order to address their main weakness.

“We were actually one of the fastest cars, if not the fastest car, in a straight line,” Shovlin said. “So we’re on quite a light wing level and what we could do is slow ourselves down in sector two and three to try and recover a bit of that time in sector one.

“But ideally we’d like to keep that and work out a way to try and improve sector one by means other than just putting a load more downforce on the car and then paying the price for it on the straight.”

And Mercedes are planning “experiments” to try out at next week’s Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne in a bid to get to the bottom of the issue.

“There’s definitely data that we’re picking through from Jeddah,” Shovlin added. “We’re also looking at data from the Bahrain race and the Bahrain test and we’ll 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.”