Mercedes have faltered for the third year running to nail the new ground effect regulations. The Silver Arrows have been struggling to make amends since 2022 and things haven’t improved even in 2024. However, there is no single root cause behind this, and the team does not know where to work to make the W15 competitive, reveals Toto Wolff.
According to MotorsportWeek, the Mercedes boss said, “It’s probably so tough in my career, in everything I’ve done before, be in finance, in investments, that you know which screws to turn and you know sometimes it takes time because back in my Williams days I knew what was missing. But here I don’t think we’re missing something.”
Wolff also mentioned that the engineers back at Brackley ignored an awful lot of things to understand the car. However, none of that worked out. The W13 had issues with porpoising, and to rectify it, the Silver Arrows had to compromise on performance. In 2023, the W14 had rear instability, something Lewis Hamilton pointed out multiple times.
They believed to have rectified it as well after ignoring it for months. Despite this, there wasn’t much improvement in the W15 and Wolff is baffled, to say the least. “We weren’t sure about our suspension; we weren’t sure about the stiffness of our gearbox carrier.”
“We had a vibrating steering rack and all of those things have disappeared, but fundamentally whatever we see in the tunnel doesn’t correlate with what’s happening on the track,” added the Austrian boss.
This goes on to prove that the Mercedes challengers are behaving irrationally on track, as compared to the data on the wind tunnel. Therefore, it’s clear that the Silver Arrows are yet to understand what’s wrong with their car. Hence, in such a situation, it’s hard to fix something that’s not understandable.
What makes 2024 worse for Toto Wolff’s team?
Mercedes had an underwhelming start to their season in 2024. Going by the statistics, this has been their worst start since 2012. The W15 is comparatively slower in terms of straight-line speed, and cornering ability and becomes vulnerable in windy conditions.
The Brackley team currently have 26 points in three races and are placed in P4, ahead of Aston Martin in P5. Even though Hamilton and Russell had somewhat decent outings in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, they had a day to forget in Australia.
Both Silver Arrows had DNFs and had to leave the Land Down Under without a single point! While the seven-time world champion suffered from a reliability issue in Lap 17, his teammate had a massive shunt in the closing laps at Albert Park. Therefore, Wolff has a lot on his table that needs rectification as the season progresses.
On top of this, Mercedes’ immediate rivals Ferrari and McLaren have improved significantly in comparison and this makes the situation more vulnerable. All in all, Toto Wolff and his team are in big jeopardy after Hamilton decided to part ways next year and they are yet to field a competitive car. That too, in the third year of the regulations.
