F1 News: Mercedes Reveals Exciting News For 2024 "Into The Right Place"

The development could mark the end of most aero problems on the W14 F1 car.

Mercedes seems to have finally found some relief from the aerodynamic challenges that were coming in the way of the team's progress. After almost two years of 'flying blind', the team finally has a view of the light at the end of the tunnel that could potentially solve most of its problems. 

The Mercedes team had to face a mountain of challenges with the switch to ground-effect cars in Formula 1 in 2022. The team was forced to run their W13 F1 cars too close to the ground to produce enough downforce. However, a lowered ride height caused porpoising problems on the car and it didn't end there. The troubles doubled as the downforce levels mandated the car be run with stiff suspension, making it more challenging to run on bumpy tracks. 

For 2023 though, Mercedes played with a wider range of ride heights since the rule was relaxed by the FIA but in the process of avoiding a risky approach, it found itself running much higher than other cars and delivered results as they are today. Acknowledging the over-cautious approach the team adopted, Mercedes technical director James Allison explained to Motorsport.com:

"Although we made great strides last year, 2023 presented all the Teams with a rule change that offered some protection against bouncing. Over the winter we faced a choice. Go aggressive and trade the bouncing protection in the rule change for performance, or take a more cautious route and steer clear of the sort of porpoising that wrecked our season last year.

"We chose the cautious path, knowing that it would be less painful to correct if we were wrong. The story of our year so far has been mostly about finding out that we had been too cautious and making the changes to correct that."

The thing with ride height is that when you adjust a significant amount of it, you are effectively changing the entire aero, courtesy of the complex nature of the current generation F1 cars which are dependent on the harnessing of vortices underneath the floor. Making these changes to the existing car mid-season is not an option for Mercedes but it is something that could be addressed on the W15 car and the team has just that in mind. 

Given the fair amount of knowledge they've gained from running too low in 2022 and running too high this year, chief technical officer Mike Elliott reveals that the team has indeed figured out the perfect ride height for their car which effectively means that they've sorted most of their aero challenges, despite the restrictions on wind tunnel time. He revealed:

"The real difficulty is, if you look at the aero testing restrictions, you've got so limited a number of runs, and you've got to pick a direction and go for it. 

"If you go down the route of saying I want to develop a car for high ride height or low ride height, and I want to be able to cover all my bases, then suddenly you'd be doing like three runs a week on each one and going nowhere.

"So, you have to sort of pick a direction and go in it. Then, as you learn, you can tweak that direction and move it slightly. I like to think we've sort of gotten ourselves into the right place for the winter."

Though the team is headed in the right direction with the 2024 car, that isn't going to stop them from developing the existing car as much as they can since they've still got some learning to do. He said:

"I think there's still learning we can do, and there's still P2 to fight for in the championship. We'll keep developing, but obviously, our prime focus now is next year's car.

"Fundamentally, we want to be winning world championships. I think that's our prime focus and we'll put our efforts into doing that. 

"I think when you look at trying to develop a brand-new car, when you're making architectural changes, it's hard to sort of keep that pace in the tunnel. So, in actual fact, some of the running we're doing for this year's car is just helpful learning and it's helpful learning at the track, without really hindering next year's car."