Mercedes still unsure whether Spa floor upgrade is working · RaceFans

August 28, 2024

in Racing

Reading Time: 3 mins read

Mercedes admit they nonetheless aren’t certain the brand new ground they launched on the Belgian Grand Prix is working as supposed.

The staff’s vehicles completed seventh and eighth at Zandvoort, the primary time they ran the brand new ground in a race. The drivers described the automotive’s dealing with as troublesome and after the race Lewis Hamilton mentioned they wanted to look into “whether or not our improve is definitely delivering or not.”

Mercedes’ technical director James Allison admitted they nonetheless “don’t absolutely know” whether or not the ground is performing because it ought to.

“You’ll be able to take some easy measurements and say the downforce it was purported to ship regarded prefer it was there,” he mentioned in a video launched by the staff. “So at one stage you possibly can take consolation that it labored as anticipated.

“However plenty of the tempo of the vehicles, on this 12 months notably, is all the way down to how properly they deal with. So it’s not only a query of does your aero bundle ship you downforce, however is it delivering you the balanced automotive that you just want by the corners? Is it delivering you the balanced automotive you want from high-speed to low-speed?

“We undoubtedly know that we didn’t have a well-balanced automotive this weekend. That’s the place most of our tempo went. Whether or not that was the brand new ground, the brand new aero bundle or not, we have to hold an open thoughts and it’s one thing we might want to revisit in future races.

“So proper now, we all know it measured the downforce, however we’re not sure that it delivered good stability. One thing we have to examine as we go on by the 12 months.”

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Mercedes gained three of the 4 rounds earlier than they raced with the brand new ground. Allison mentioned the staff hadn’t received the set-up proper at Zandvoort.

“It gained’t be so simple as the monitor doesn’t go well with the automotive. Whether or not or not you have got weekend depends on an enormous variety of issues and all of them should be just about close to dead-on proper to get what you name the true tempo of the automotive out.

“Within the run as much as the shutdown, we managed to hit our stride just about at each monitor. We type of went a little bit bit off the rails in Spa, however managed to drag it again simply in time.

“This weekend in Zandvoort, with the climate the way in which it was on the Friday and the choices we took in a single day, we simply didn’t handle to get into the groove that we wanted to get the most effective from the automotive. And small errors, small errors in set-up will flip you from being actually fairly aggressive into fairly mediocre. It’s tight on the prime and we didn’t get it proper this weekend and had a mediocre end result as a consequence.”