2024 Mercedes-AMG | Petronas F1 Team

[DGP123]

I believe Mercedes is truly finished, they have to fix their wind tunnel and tools and 2026 cars work start in 2025
They Don't have enough time

Can’t see much changing within 8 months. Anyone they recruit will be on lengthy gardening leave. They’ve got zero understanding of GE, outdated tools, a leader out of his depth, and the likelihood of a Russell & Ocon/Antonelli driver line up.

Absolute shambles from top to bottom, and midfield irrelevance awaits for quite some time. McLaren will beat them with the same engine in 26’, and Simone Resta alone, won’t fix this mess.

Sad decline, but the reason Hamilton has jumped, and the reason Max has no intention of joining.

[PlatinumZealot]

Lewis saw this decline from last year. Man this is a tough pill to swallow for the team. I mean, soundly beating by two customer teams and a Haas for good measure!

[AR3-GP]

For big changes to work, you have to change everything, starting at the nose / front wing, and working backward. That just doesn't work in the cost cap era.

Except Mclaren just did it in Miami this weekend and again last year. They even changed their front and rear suspension geometry.

The excuses have run out. The cost cap isn't Merc's problem. Their problem is they simply don't know what to do. The ideas aren't good enough.

[Hoffman900]

If I remember correctly, Mclaren shifted their design late, so they really launched a Beta car last year while their launch budget shifted, and brought the parts a little late.

And again, correlation. Mercedes thinks they have it every year until it gets on track. Their CFD and WT probably look great, instilling a lot of confidence, and they fall flat. CFD and WT’s are simulations of the real world. They have some big issue going on here. Their engineers are sharp, but garbage in (data) = garbage out (a slow car), GIGO.

This is the downfall of the lack of actual car testing. CFD and WT’s can notoriously be wrong, and everyone from Boeing and Lockheed Martin to F1 teams struggle with it. This is why you should ALWAYS be skeptical of CFD plots people share and trying to draw set in stone conclusions.

[ringo]

So if Red Bull’s chassis were always that good why didn’t they win 2021 by a mile then? Maybe because their chassis wasn’t that good after all! Plus don’t forget that the 2021 cars were 2020 cars with cut floors! So guess where Mercedes lost all that performance from 2020 to 2021…

So you are agreeing that redbull made tractors?
That's the big lie.
Redbull had the best chassis in 2021. Ask Adrian Newey.
They did not win by a mile because of unfortunate events in the season. Crashes at silverston, hungary, reliability issues, tyre issues in Baku... to name a few and just plain lack of champion fighting experience.
That championship was Max's to lose not for the bad luck and all or nothing mentality.
Mercedes still had the stronger engine in 2021. Honda had better ERS.
Hamilton had the better tyre management for some reason. But Redbull did not have the 2nd best chassis. And there is jounalistic evidence out there saying as much.
Mercedes always had peaky diva cars with suspension quirks that would give them unpredictable tyre behavior in qualifying and on some street circuits.
The monstrous engine and DAS and other suspension tricks compensated for their mechanical design gaps.
At no point did i remeber Redbull having any unexplainable behavior with their chassis.
I think you should retract the statement of me telling lies and just run through your memory again.

[Hammerfist]

The so called good Newey designed cars ruined the confidence of many drivers coming through the RB ranks.. how many times did Gasly & Albon crash in 2019-2020?

Acting like RB always had good cars now is revisionist. For much of 2016-2020 they were no better than a W13/w14 which are somehow tractors.

The main issue those cars had was Power related. Red Bull as a team were fighting with a hand behind their back for those years...as soon as they got some PU parity, we saw what happened.

I mean that was pretty obvious i would think. Their success came at the more twisty tracks that werent power reliant. Even the 2014 chassis was quite good. It was just severely underpowered. Id say the only bad chassis was 2015, but for only half a year.

[ringo]

Mercedes w14 and w13 features are coming back as upgrades on the other cars. I find this troubling.
The upgrades aren't carbon copies, but you can see that in their effort to work around their poor floor and suspension understanding mercedes have delved into very advanced developmdnt of bodywork over the past 2 years.

The zero pods dont even seem like such a bad idea apart from the compromise for thr weight distribution and driver placement.

Of note also is Aston Martin's struggles. I suspect they are due to the Mercedes gearbox.

There's just something this team is just not able to comprehend for these set of regs.

They need to make an illegal car with moveable suspension. Drive it on track and let it move to remedy the poor characteristics. Then go back through the data to see where their legal suspension needs to react to give the optimal aero platform.

[Hoffman900]

Mercedes w14 and w13 features are coming back as upgrades on the other cars. I find this troubling.
The upgrades aren't carbon copies, but you can see that in their effort to work around their poor floor and suspension understanding mercedes have delved into very advanced developmdnt of bodywork over the past 2 years.

The zero pods dont even seem like such a bad idea apart from the compromise for thr weight distribution and driver placement.

Of note also is Aston Martin's struggles. I suspect they are due to the Mercedes gearbox.

There's just something this team is just not able to comprehend for these set of regs.

They need to make an illegal car with moveable suspension. Drive it on track and let it move to remedy the poor characteristics. Then go back through the data to see where their legal suspension needs to react to give the optimal aero platform.

I’m more inclined to believe Aston’s issues are Merc’s wind tunnel.

[ringo]

Ah! Yes that may be the problem indeed.

Which WT does Haas and Alpine use?
Mercedes are about to be overtaken by those two.

[Hoffman900]

Ah! Yes that may be the problem indeed.

Which WT does Haas and Alpine use?
Mercedes are about to be overtaken by those two.

Alpine has their own and Haas uses Ferrari (though they have the Haas Windshear tunnel, they feel the Ferrari one is better set up for F1).

[Sevach]

I’m more inclined to believe Aston’s issues are Merc’s wind tunnel.

We are gonna test this theory when they switch to their new facilities.

[AR3-GP]

The issue is not the Wind Tunnel.

[Hoffman900]

The issue is not the WindTunnel.

And you know this how?

My statement is vague enough to be wrong, you’re stating it as fact.

[AR3-GP]

The issue is not the WindTunnel.

And you know this how?

A wind tunnel is mechanically and operationally an incredibly simplistic device. There just isn't actually anything to go wrong on it as a measuring instrument that isn't caught immediately. It doesn't produce "wrong values". The balance system is calibrated with standard weights. The air speed and dynamic pressure are measured in real time. The rolling road speed is measured in real time. The model motion system set points are cross referenced with sensors inside the model.

If there is aerodynamic phenomena which is not reproduced because of downscaling of size, this is something that impacts all teams equally because it’s a scaling issue, not something inherent to a windtunnel. You have small things like making sure the section is wide enough, but that’s not Mercs issue. It would have mattered in the previous regs too which they got right.

[hollus]

OK, there is nothing wrong with the building and physical parts of the wind tunnel. Fine. Data collection, calibration, interpretation and (sure, modelable) scale and wall artifacts are, for most people, part of the wind tunnel. Let's not be argumentative for the sake of being argumentative.