SUMMARY
- The next race of the 2024 season is set to take place in Melbourne for the Australian GP.
- The W15 has been not been performing better after the changes that were made before the start of the new season.
Mercedes has hoped to give Red Bull competition during the 2024 season. However, after a disappointing start in the Bahrain and Saudi GP, Mercedes has agreed that W15 has “fundamental” issues.
The Silver Arrows team used the winter break after the 2023 season to work on the car’s performance. However, the changes made were not enough to give competition to the race leaders.
Lewis Hamilton has not been able to get satisfying results with the Mercedes team. He believes that the changes made to the car are not sufficient and that more changes are needed to perform better ahead of the Australian GP.
Mercedes engineer talks about W15’s issue
Andrew Shovlin, the trackside race engineer for the Silver Arrows team, shared his thoughts on why the car failed to perform even after making changes based on the practice runs before the race.
Shovlin said, “When you change things you can see the differences. So one car making changes, you can see how it performs run to run”. He added, “We can also look at the global performance of the two cars but fundamentally the limitations that we had in qualifying and the race, they were broadly the same for both.”
He added, “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.”
Mercedes doubled down on their belief that there is a “fundamental” issue to resolve with the W15, Andrew Shovlin confirming “experiments” are in the works to aid their cause. 👇#Mercedes #Formula1 #F1 https://t.co/wZ0IBaR81d
— PlanetF1 (@Planet_F1) March 13, 2024
Shovlin believes that the W15 is not giving its best because of tiny problems that can’t be fixed by small adjustments. Both cars of the Mercedes are underperforming during the practice and races. This assures that the W15 has fundamental issues that need work.
Shovlin remains optimistic with the W15 ahead of the Australian GP. The gap after two consecutive race weeks has bought some time for the Silver Arrows team to work on the car ahead of the race.
The struggling segments of W15 identified by Mercedes
The Australian GP will be conducted at Albert Park Circuit in Melbourne. Both the Melbourne and Jeddah tracks share a lot of high-speed corners. according to reports lot of data is collected from the Jeddah track to improve the performance of W15. The car seems to struggle at high-speed corners and tends to lose balance and oversteer.
Shovlin said, “The balance wasn’t great, so those very fast corners, the walls aren’t particularly far away. So 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. He added, “and you can easily imagine how unsettling that is for the drivers.”
The W15 has taken a hit after the regulation change after the 2021 season. However, the car has managed to be one of the fastest cars in Jeddah. While the car is performing well in one part it’s the rest that needs a little more work. Shovlin is hoping that the team doesn’t have to sacrifice the progress they made in one area to improve performance in another area.
Shovlin said, “We were actually one of the fastest cars, if not the fastest car in a straight line, so we were on quite a lot a light wing level. He added, “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 straights.”
While the team has been struggling with the current car, the team is working endlessly on it to make it more competitive. Hamilton has proved with his 7 championships what a good car can do. Mercedes hopes to recreate this by improving the car’s performance.