After dominating the sport for the best part of eight seasons, Mercedes finally showed signs of weakness in 2022. All teams in F1 were hit with massively regulation changes, and Mercedes failed to cope with them as well as Ferrari or Red Bull. This hampered the German squad’s performance in the early stages as they massively struggled for pace.
A new term that F1 fans were introduced to this season was ‘porpoising’. It was used to describe the bouncing of a car while drivers went flat out on the straights. The effect it had on the physical health of drivers was brought into the spotlight after Lewis Hamilton complained of back & neck problems after the Azerbaijan GP. However, as it turns out, the car too was taking damage while the cars were bouncing.
FIA takes steps to reduce porpoising in the interests of safetyhttps://t.co/XTs7zC4oKx
— FIA (@fia) June 16, 2022
Mercedes’ team principal Toto Wolff and powertrains head Hywel Thomas described how their engine suffered because of the porpoising. According to them, the bouncing of the W13 ‘nearly broke’ their engine on multiple occasions.
Mercedes’ engine development halted because of porpoising, says Toto Wolff
According to Thomas, the team made a strong engine for the 2022 season ahead of the freeze but they didn’t take porpoising into consideration before designing it. This is why they had to spend a huge chunk of the season figuring out how to overcome that problem before thinking about development.
“At the beginning of the season, the two big things that we had was firstly the power was going to get frozen and it was going to be a hardware freeze,” Thomas revealed. “And that’s what we were going to be using for the next three years.”
“(However) It was becoming very clear that the engines were taking a hell of a pounding,” he added.
“I think when Wolff came up to Brixworth last week and saw some of the some of the parts that were off the race engines. It’s quite a surprise to see exactly how hard they were being hit by the ground.”
Mercedes managed to get better over the course of the 2022 season. The gave Ferrari a scare towards the end, and fell just short of P2, which looked ever so distant at the beginning of the year.
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