Mercedes explain why W13 was so slow on straights at Suzuka

Lacking straight line at Suzuka, which cost Lewis Hamilton in his battle with Esteban Ocon, Andrew Shovlin says Mercedes paid the price for running “our highest downforce level” in a race without DRS.

Hamilton spent a wet Sunday afternoon at the Japanese Grand Prix staring at the rear wing of Ocon’s Alpine, the two running fourth and fifth for most of the 28 laps.

The Briton tried time and time again to pass, at one moment it did look as if he’d succeeded only for Ocon to power ahead, the Alpine’s straight-line speed up on the W13’s.

Ocon took fourth ahead of the seven-time World Champion by 0.641s.

Hamilton told Sky Sports: “We were just so slow in a straight line. I was getting close, as close as I could. You could probably see it on the TV, as soon as I pulled out they would just pull away. I wish it was a longer race.”

Great battle for P4 ?

Ocon is holding off Hamilton for now#JapaneseGP #F1 pic.twitter.com/6bTmloVohW

— Formula 1 (@F1) October 9, 2022

According to Auto Motor und Sport, Hamilton and George Russell were tied for 19th and 20th place at the two measuring points, the first on the home straight and the second on the straight after the Spoon curve.

Their deficit to the Red Bull was ‘eight to ten km/h, to the Ferrari and Alpine six to eight km/h’.

Mercedes’ problem on the day was that they ran a large rear wing, bigger than that used by Red Bull, Ferrari or Alpine, and with no DRS in play on the wet track the drivers found it difficult to overtake.

“We decided to stay at our highest downforce level,” explained Shovlin, the team’s trackside engineering director.

“Part of that decision was that it was actually giving us the best lap times in the race condition where we were going to get high degradation in the dry, but we had also seen this rain that was coming in on Sunday and we felt that in a wet race that might be a benefit.

“As it happens, the DRS was never enabled, and that meant that overtaking was very, very hard and perhaps the right decision would have been a lower downforce setting.

“But fundamentally, one of the things that we need to improve on the car for next year is to get the car to have more downforce at the lower drag levels and then we can race those lighter wings and still be competitive in the corners.”

Mercedes have just four races in which to score their first win of this season or the team will record a winless campaign for the first time since 2011.

Mercedes are six months behind their rivals in car development

Mercedes technical director Mike Elliott summed up Mercedes’ weekend at the Suzuka circuit: “We expected a little more.”

But the Brackley squad has been on the back foot all season, ever since they found their W13 bouncing from once track to another.

The team spent the first part of the championship resolving the porpoising problems, believing all the while that underneath that they had a good car.

They didn’t.

“The issues we’ve built into the car we couldn’t see because of the bouncing,” said Elliott. “We thought ‘we’re in, we’re going in the right direction’, and then got a proper kick in the teeth.

“You peel the next layer off the onion, if you like, and you’ve got another problem that was the one we’d really baked into the car in the winter.”

That has meant the team has spent the second part of the championship doing what all the others were able to do in the first part, fixing the car’s fundamental problems.

Mercedes are basically six months behind Red Bull and Ferrari in the progression of their all-new ground effect aerodynamic car.

They haven’t been helped by the budget cap limiting their spending, but one would be hard-pressed to imagine a repeat of this season come next year.

Expect Mercedes to catch up, and catch up fast.

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