Mercedes believe their car’s bouncing problem returned at the Belgian Grand Prix because of how they set it up, and not due to the latest upgrade they introduced.
Both drivers complained the W14 bounced excessively during the race at Spa-Francorchamps.
“We definitely had an amount of bouncing this weekend,” chief technical officer Mike Elliott admitted in a video issued by the team. “Both drivers were telling us that and we can see it in the data.
“We could also see bouncing on the other cars. I think some of it is the nature of the circuit at Spa, in fact, we had huge amounts of bouncing last year, as did most teams.
“In terms of performance, it definitely affected the performance of the car because it affects the drivers’ ability to extract the maximum grip from the car. It affects their balance and it affects their ability to get their braking points, et cetera right. So that’s definitely something we’ll be working on for the future.”
Mercedes introduced the latest upgrade for their car last weekend, including modifications to their floor and sidepods. However the team suspects it was not this but the car’s set-up which caused their bouncing problem. As the Belgian Grand Prix was a sprint race weekend, they only had an hour of practice in which to set up their cars, and rain further compromised their efforts.
“The question we need to ask ourselves is how much of it is just the circuit we were at in Spa and how much is it to be found in set-up?” said Elliott. “Because obviously it was a wet race weekend, a weekend where we have no dry running up until the point we were actually racing.
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“We’ll also take a really good look at the upgrade kit and make sure we’ve not introduced bouncing with that. But at the moment our belief is it’s probably a result of set-up or the circuit itself.”
While Lewis Hamilton qualified third on the grid for the race, he wasn’t able to gain places in the race and finished behind Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc. Elliott admitted the car did not perform as well as expected in the grand prix.
“That’s an unusual thing because generally we’ve got good tyre degradation and generally we do much better in the races than we do in qualifying,” he explained.
“When you look at this weekend as a whole, the mixed conditions and the drying tracks that we had meant that qualifying was such that the pace was changing lap to lap as the track dried up. The tyres you were running on were changing session to session so that was probably more about what the driver can get out of the car than getting to that sort of perfect point at the end of qualifying. Both our drivers did an excellent job to safely navigate through the weekend and put in good laps when they needed them.
“In terms of the race pace, I think that is all about degradation and to get the degradation you want, you’ve got to have the balance in exactly the place you want it. For us this weekend, we weren’t there, and I think that’s just a result of not having dry laps in practice, not having enough opportunity to get the set-up of the car just where you want it and relatively, we ended up with a car that wasn’t quite as well balanced as maybe some of our competitors were.
“As a result we had more tyre degradation and therefore weren’t really able to extract the race pace that we would like to have seen.”
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2023 Belgian Grand Prix
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