Big weakness with new Mercedes upgrade has been exposed
Mercedes' new Formula 1 upgrade being comprehensively beaten by its older spec in sprint qualifying at the Singapore Grand Prix has exposed a core weakness with the latest package.George Russell qualified...
Mercedes' new Formula 1 upgrade being comprehensively beaten by its older spec in sprint qualifying at the Singapore Grand Prix has exposed a core weakness with the latest package. George Russell qualified second for the Singapore sprint race in the older-spec Mercedes, 0.573s faster than team-mate Kimi Antonelli, who is using the upgrade the team debuted in Malaysia last week.
The team had gone into the Marina Bay weekend electing to split the packages across its drivers in the bid to get a swift answer as to why its performance in the Bahrain Grand Prix a week ago had been so lacklustre. That experiment has delivered answers on the first day, with it understood that there are fundamental characteristics differences between the two cars.
And in particular, the latest upgrade in Antonelli’s hands has shown itself to have a narrow balance window - so it transitions very quickly between understeer and oversteer, which makes it hard for the driver to get confidence. Furthermore, this characteristic results in the tyres sliding more than is ideal, which has a notable impact on qualifying performances.
While that trait is now clear, what Mercedes does not understand is why it is happening and whether it is related to the new developments leading to a narrow set-up window or if it has just not worked out how to get the most potential from it. Mercedes trackside engineer director Andrew Shovlin admitted sprint qualifying "has left us with a bit of head scratching to do to understand why the update is not bringing the performance step we expect.
"Neither car had a great balance, although Kimi was lacking more confidence on the braking and entry phase, and that's what you need to attack a qualifying lap here. "We'll keep working to understand why that's the case. We've got plenty of data around us to try and make some progress, and hopefully we'll be able to get Kimi's car in a better place for main qualifying tomorrow." Mercedes is well aware that it needs swift answers about its upgrades, because it needs faith that design directions it has taken are working as it accelerates efforts on its 2027 challenger.
Team boss Toto Wolff was unsure about what the team could settle on longer term, but The Race understands that Mercedes will stick to Antonelli running the latest spec throughout the remainder of the Singapore weekend despite Friday’s performance because answers matter more than immediate performance.
“There is a pattern, but most important is to really dissect what's working and what's not on the old and the new spec, and then finding a way forward in picking the best bits and seeing where the development direction needs to get us in order to extract the optimum laptime,” Wolff said.
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And what is the pattern he refers to? “The new car seems to be a little more trickier to drive,” he added. “I’m not saying it's necessarily slower because there will be goodness in it, but maybe we haven't just found a way of putting it all together and tuning it.
“The older car is a bit stable, grippy, but that is really just a little...that's one data point, that is one free practice session, and it will be needing more time to really come to more conclusive information.” Gary Anderson's verdict Mercedes left Malaysia with a lot of questions over its performance, and I would agree that it wasn’t what it should be.
In my analysis of its developments for that race, I ended with the following comments. The big question is: will Mercedes deliver that expected 0.3 seconds per lap improvement? It’s always difficult from the outside to quantify any level of improvement.
Based on its performance so far this year, if it doesn’t lock out the front row in qualifying and finish first and second in the race, we can assume that Mercedes has fallen short of those expectations. Over the weekend, I didn’t see that improvement of 0.3 seconds, so I’m sure there has been some head-scratching.
What Wolff said after free practice in Singapore seems to suggest that’s still going on, given he referenced the possibility of having to pick out the best bits of the upgrade for the future direction. Antonelli backed that up after qualifying, saying: "The car is very difficult, very unpredictable, and very difficult to put a lap together." However, its development continues.
For Singapore, Mercedes tested a new front wing with a two-element straight mode rather than the previous single-moving-element version. As it’s a bolt-on component, both cars tried it during FP1 and, in my humble opinion, it’s one of the areas that I would have been looking at. Its original version was mounted on the middle element (green shading and arrows).
This had potentially three advantages. One, it meant that the FIA deflection tests were probably just that little bit easier to pass. Two, any deflection because of the actual induced aerodynamic load would be more uniform, giving a more stable centre of pressure.
Three, because of one and two, overall it should be lighter. As we can see, the overall chord length of the assembly (yellow arrow) on both versions is very similar. However, the chord length of the rear flap (cyan arrow) is now shorter, which means that when the assembly goes from straight-line mode to cornering mode, the airflow, helped by the position of that slot gap between the two elements, will re-attach to this new assembly faster and with more consistency.
With the original version, if the rear wing airflow was struggling to re-attach, then slowing down the re-attachment of the front wing would mean that the car wouldn’t be so nervous on turn-in. But to achieve that, it would mean that for a few hundredths of a second at corner entry, the maximum overall grip would not be available and it wouldn’t necessarily be very consistent.
Mercedes said that's only a test item that it wanted to validate, so it was removed after FP1, with both drivers using the original specification.
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