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Mercedes’ Technical Director James Allison says “the strongest correlation that we can make at the moment, is that our competitiveness drops when the track is warm”.
Although Mercedes had a disappointing weekend at the Australian Grand Prix, in the team’s race debrief video, Technical Director James Allison said the team’s performance oscillations from practice to qualifying, have provided them with valuable “clues” on where the problem might lie.
“Almost no set-up changes occurred between FP3 and qualifying,” Allison said.
“We take fuel out of course, we turn the engine up to 11, all those things. But no significant difference on set-up because we felt we got the car in a decent window in FP3 and that was reflected in the timesheets.
“But we are starting to see a pattern emerge that most weekends we have a period in the weekend where we are feeling good about the car, confident about the car, but then in the paying sessions, in qualifying and the race, that slips through our fingers.
“If we were trying to draw that pattern together then probably the strongest correlation that we can make at the moment, is that our competitiveness drops when the track is warm, when the day is at its warmest and therefore the tyre temperatures rise with those of the track.
“The times when we have been at our best have been all in the sessions which are the coolest and so that gives us some clues about what we need to do as we move forward from here.
“But from FP3 to qualifying in Melbourne there was not a set-up change.”
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Now, with that knowledge, Mercedes knows the path they need to take to come to grips with the car’s issues.
“It is better defined in terms of the amount of time that will take.
“If you know what you’re shooting for, if you’ve sort of identified correctly an accurate assessment of why our competitiveness waxes and wanes, then you can work into the weekend a program that is dedicated toward trying to move the temperature and the temperature balance front to rear in your favour and using all the conventional set-up tools on the car.
“That work you can do back here in the factory and the simulation and so on.
“But if you conclude having exhausted the degrees of freedom that you have available to you in set-up terms that you still need to go further, well then that gets harder at that point because that will be that there are underlying characteristics in say the aerodynamic map that you’ve engineered, or the suspension characteristic that is aggravating that particular feature, and in order to make it really heal up nicely then you would have to change those underlying features.
“It can be either quick and dirty or a little more involved and a bit more complicated,” the Briton concluded.
