Lewis Hamilton doubts Mercedes will be able to challenge Red Bull in the near future as their rivals are “continuously bringing upgrades”.
Mercedes made a significant change to the design of its car earlier this year, abandoning its novel ‘zero sidepod’ configuration after failing to find the performance gains it needed during the off-season.
Hamilton has taken three podium finishes since that upgrade was introduced in Monaco. However he doubts Mercedes’ rate of development over the remaining races will allow them to make rapid inroads on Red Bull, who have won every race so far this year.
The airflow produced by the latest generation of cars, especially underneath their floors, is so complicated that finding gains is a slow process, said Hamilton.
“The thing we can’t see is the airflow throughout the car,” he explained. “They’re limited when you look in the wind tunnel, there’s only a certain amount you can move the car.
“There’s simulations, with the new rules that we have, all the new tools that we’ve had to create to understand the flow structures underneath the car and all vortices would blow your mind if you saw what’s happening underneath the car, which is a lot different to the previous generations of cars. Working through that just takes time.”
The amount of development work teams can conduct is limited by F1’s Aerodynamic Testing Restriction and their spending is constrained by the budget cap. This limits how quickly they can make progress and means making the wrong development decision is costly.
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“You’re very limited with resources as well so you have to be careful of which decisions you make,” said Hamilton. “If you go full-steam ahead in this direction, you could lose weeks of development, it could be tenths of performance.
“So they have to be very methodical in the way they go through that process. I wish it was faster, but unfortunately it’s not.”
“Things are in the pipeline for many races to come,” Hamilton added. “That’s always the case because it takes time to build things.”
Earlier this year Mercedes restored former technical director James Allison to the role in place of Mike Elliott. Hamilton said he was encouraged by the latest meeting involving him, team mate George Russell and the team on their development direction.
“James is great, we’ve got a really good relationship,” said Hamilton. “He knows when to be stern and – he’s probably never actually soft, to be honest.
“We had a great meeting just the other day when we had all the heads of departments within the room, George and I, just making sure we are on the same page, great communication and we have 100% faith in them and I think just as a group, as a whole, that we will get to where we need to be. It’s just going to take some time.”
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Hamilton said it’s not possible to ‘drive around’ their shortfall in performance at the moment, but is hopeful the Hungaroring will offer him an opportunity to close the gap to Max Verstappen, who has won the last six races in a row. “I’m always trying to rely on my driving ability to make up for the deficit but it’s not been ultimately enough in a lot of places,” he said.
“But this has been a strong circuit for me and I think last year it was a strong circuit for us. If you look at the last race for some reason we seem to be very – you may not have seen it – but we were equal in time until turn 13 to Max on a qualifying lap. Or George was, for example. And then we just lose performance in the high-speed after that. So given that this is more medium and low-speed, I’m hoping it will be closer.”
However he is concerned Red Bull have brought new parts this weekend as they seek to further increase their margin of superiority over their rivals.
“I heard that Red Bull might have an upgrade package this weekend, once again,” said Hamilton. “So we’ll see how that affects them. They seem to be continuously bringing upgrades on their car.”
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2023 Hungarian Grand Prix
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