Mercedes investigates why a suspension upgrade that was introduced at the start of the European season damages its competitiveness after he had removed it from the Hungarian Grand Prix.
George Russell finished third in Budapest to score the first stage of the team in Europe this season, together with a victory and stage in Canada. Team Principal Toto Wolff believes that the result in Montreal actually led Mercedes to let the suspension over the car longer than it should have, and that the performance that enjoyed in Budapest shows that the car is more predictable in its previous configuration.
“I think we tried to solve a problem with a mechanical upgrade [at Imola in May]”Wolff said.” And that may have solved a problem or not, but it let something different crawl into the car and that was an instability that actually took all the confidence of the drivers and it cost us a few races to find that out.
“Of course also a bit misled by the montreal victory – we think that may not be so bad and [eventually] We came to the conclusion that it should come. It came off and the car is back in solid form. “
Wolff admits that the situation is for Mercedes, because it shows a lack of correlation between the simulation tools and the reality, which had such a big unexpected impact on the characteristics of the car.
“Upgrades are here to bring performance and there are many simulations and analyzes that go into the parts of the car, and then they are just completely wrong and you have to go back to the analog world and put it on the car and see what it does and if it doesn’t do what it should do,” he said. “And that is a difficult bit, I think, for everyone in Formula 1 – how do you bring a correlation of what the digital world tells you in the real world? And that has been a function and this is the last example of how it has stumbled us.”
Explaining the impact of the change in more detail, says Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin that the suspension problem can be used to improve the understanding of Mercedes of the developments that it makes with its 2026 car.
“If we make a new suspension, we do it to let the car go faster,” said Shovlin. “And clearly, there is something that is wrong. There are areas whose drivers said the car was certainly better with that suspension. But when it came to stability in the fast corners, some of the corners where they had to wear a lot of speed on entering, they had no confidence to push the car the way they would like.
“So we would always try to make things that improve the pace of the car. This did not do. Much of the work that is now going on is to understand exactly what that problem has caused.
“It is not something that was clear, otherwise we would not have had the problem in the first place. But there will be a lot of learning there. Part of it will benefit us this year. But more importantly, it will benefit us for the future.”
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