“Is the car fast enough or not? – Mercedes does not know if the W13 is fast or not

Mercedes has not been able to find a solution for the porpoising problem in the new W13 with the Australian GP right around the corner.

Mercedes has dominated the F1 for the past eight years with consecutive constructors’ championships. However, this season it looks as though the team has fallen a lot behind following the new technical regulations.

Many teams faced problems with the porpoising in their new cars but the Brackley-based team seems to have suffered more than the others. It is to the extent that the team’s trackside engineer Andrew Shovlin does not know if they have a good car or not.

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Shovlin told Motorsport.com, “That’s probably priority number one because that’s ultimately preventing us from running the car where we’d like to run it for optimum performance.”

“What we don’t know is, if we could just magically make that issue vanish, where would we actually be in terms of car pace: is the car fast enough or not? And it’s very difficult to answer that question.”

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Mercedes is not meeting its normal standard of work

Porpoising happens when downforce pushes the car onto the track which causes the underfloor aero to stall. As that happens the car rises off from the track leading to the underfloor aero kicking in. The car is then pushed back into the ground and so it continues.

This creates a bouncing motion in the car mainly on the straights. To limit the porpoising problem, Mercedes raised the height of the car but that affects the downforce and lap time.

Shovlin said, “Fundamentally, we need to understand the problem better. We’ve got some avenues that I think are giving us a good direction, but it’s taking a bit of time to get those parts on the car. And we’re working very hard.”

“We’re well aware that there are other teams that have got on top of this problem faster than we have. And that’s not the standard we normally work to.”

“Every bit of effort at the factory is going into getting on top of this, making sure we don’t neglect normal car development. But there’s a lot of work trying to pull us out of this situation at the moment.”

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