Mercedes is preparing for the upcoming Dutch Grand Prix at Zandvoort with high hopes. The team is planning to reintroduce the updated floor that caused unexpected problems at Spa and had to be replaced after Friday’s practice sessions.
During the Belgian Grand Prix weekend, Mercedes tested a new floor on the W15 as part of a comprehensive update package. However, during Friday’s practice sessions, the drivers experienced significant bouncing issues.
After extensive overnight work at both their Brackley headquarters and on the track, the team decided to revert to the previous floor for Saturday’s sessions for better performance. However, Mercedes is confident that the new floor will perform better at Zandvoort due to the lessons learned from Spa.
A first look at the new floor Mercedes have brought to Spa this weekend ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/7Ixrv6BW2J
— AnythingF1 (@AnythingF1_) July 25, 2024
As per a report from formu1a.uno, Toto Wolff emphasized the team’s readiness to reintroduce the floor as he stated;
“We made a drastic change in order to recover some of the performance, and we believe it was in the floor. So it will be quite interesting when we put everything on the car at Zandvoort and correlate, and see what one does, and the other.”
The team’s confidence comes from the insights given by Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ trackside engineering director. Shovlin confirmed that the setup issues, not the floor itself, were to blame for the problems encountered at Spa.
Why is Shovlin confident of getting the new floor working in Zandvoort?
Shovlin highlighted that they went back to the old spec floor because of how similar the cornering speeds and the overall layout of the track are between Silverstone and Spa. And the bouncing didn’t allow the drivers to attack the corners as they wanted with the new floor.
However, he believes that a similar problem should not occur on regular tracks like in Zandvoort. With all the detailed analysis of the floor data, Shovlin is confident that Mercedes will achieve a positive result by reintroducing the complete update package at the Dutch GP. He believes that with the correct setup, the new floor can deliver the expected performance improvements.
The @MercedesAMGF1 team turned its Spa weekend around by abandoning a W15 floor update – however the issue was related to setup, and the new parts will be back at Zandvoort: https://t.co/ZyYSiYFHjO
— Adam Cooper (@adamcooperF1) August 2, 2024
“We managed to introduce a bit of bouncing to the car, so in the high-speed corners that is not great for their confidence… At a normal track, that might have cost us a little bit of time. On a big circuit like Spa with some pretty big corners, that was becoming a large number”, said Shovlin.
Now, it will be interesting to see if Mercedes’ return to their previous upgraded floor helps them achieve a good result in the upcoming Grand Prix at Zandvoort or not.
