Hamilton, meanwhile, said being lapped by last year's title rival Max Verstappen at Mercedes' worst race of the season - Emilia Romagna GP - "shows how wrong we got it". "I think the fundamental issue that overclouds and overshadows everything is that our car is porpoising more than others," said team boss Toto Wolff. Trying to stop the bouncing also means Mercedes aren't able to run their car as low as they want, harming downforce further.
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Sky F1's Karun Chandhok analyses the porpoising issue that has been troubling some drivers As you can imagine, that's not great for lap time, and the team believe that is causing most if not all of their deficit - around a second per lap. While most teams have had this issue - even leaders Ferrari - it is largely just on the straights, while Mercedes' porpoising carries on into the corner. The speed sucks the car to the ground until the airflow stalls, at which point the downforce is lost and the car rises, only for the airflow to reattach and repeat the process. To explain porpoising simply, it is the bouncing motion that is caused by downforce generated under cars as they gain speed. "And unfortunately we got on track, there was no bouncing in the windtunnel and we came across this phenomenon." "Our windtunnel was telling us we had really good downforce," explained Hamilton. The design they had worked on, and was fast in the simulator, led to 'porpoising', a sensation many cars have but has hit Mercedes hardest. The problem is that once the car hit the track, it bounced on the track.
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His role changed in the middle of 2021 when Mike Elliott took over as technical director, but Allison’s remit has always included F1, “in full support” of Elliott.Lewis Hamilton continued to have difficulties with porpoising in his Mercedes during second practice in Bahrain He also that role for the Ineos Britannia America’s Cup team. However, his role remains unchanged.Īllison’s current job title is chief technical officer across the Mercedes F1 team and its applied science division. There have been suggestions former technical director James Allison has been parachuted in to take over full-time leadership of the project as Mercedes attempts to set on the right direction. But it would surprise me immensely if that turned out to be the ‘light switch’ moment.” “It wouldn’t surprise me to see different sidepods on the car. I don’t think it’s as simple as, ‘let’s change the sidepods’ to something more conventional. “Even changing the sidepods can quite often involve a fundamental re-engineering because you’ve got to possibly move radiators, mounting points and things like that. That’s a huge area and it’s not just, ‘let’s change the sidepods’. Mechanically it’s the same as the Aston Martin at the back so it’s to do with the airflow coming over the front wing, through the front suspension, down the sidepods and under the floor.
“It’s much more likely to be found in the interplay between the underfloor and the sidepods and the rear end of the car. Just because the sidepod’s different, it doesn’t mean that therefore it’s the sidepod. “They need to know what is driving the lack of performance. What Mercedes might need to change Mark Hughes “Of course, we are looking at where we can improve the car, we are looking for potential to develop and you will see visible changes coming on the car over the next few races.” There is quite a lot of development that you’ve got to do around any sort of big change in geometry in that area.
“But those changes take time to turn into a faster solution in the windtunnel – you can’t do them overnight.
“Given the gap to the front of course we are going to look at bigger departures and more radical changes. “People have tended to use the word concept when they mean the sidepod design and Toto had said recently that we are looking at a revision that is going to come along in the next few races anyway,” said Shovlin.
He also alluded to the possibility of the distinctive minimal sidepods being replaced by a version more in line with the rest of the field.
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