Mercedes technical director James Allison admitted they felt “dumb” not to more quickly solve a key problem which dogged their latest car.
The team’s performance has improved in recent races, particularly following the introduction of a new front wing design at the Monaco Grand Prix. Allison said their improvement has come about because they can make their car perform well in a mixture of cornering speeds.
“The thing that has bedevilled us from the start of the year, the overriding thing, was that you could get the car okay in a slow corner, get it quite decent in a fast corner, but you couldn’t get it good in both at the same time,” he told the official F1 channel.
“What has changed in the last two, three races is that we’ve modified the car in such a way as it actually has a reasonable high-to-low-speed balance and a reasonable through-corner balance.
“Those are sort of boringly jargony things that it just means that the driver can trust both the front and rear axle in a fast corner and a slow corner, and can trust it from when he hits the brakes at the beginning of the corner, all the way through the apex and out the other side. That balance is crucial to a driver, that they know whether the car is going to understeer or oversteer, and that it’s going to follow the trajectory.”
Allison describe the breakthrough as “more of an ‘oh God, how can we have been so dumb?’-type moment where you see the path forward and you should have seen it sooner.”
The team realised it needed an aerodynamic solution, which its revised front wing is part of. “A thing that we’d been fighting all year with springs and bars and all the mechanical accoutrements on the car, [we’re now] just attacking it with the aerodynamic characteristic of the car,” Allison said.
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“It’s quite easy to get distracted by things that are side problems rather than the main problem – to allow yourself the indulgence that if we just sort out that little thing then we’ll be okay,” he added. “And so we worked on things that did actually make the car better but weren’t the fundamental problem.”
George Russell took pole position for the last round in Montreal, and though Allison suspects that track flattered their car, he believes the upward trend in their performance will continue.
“I think that we definitely can get the car this season to be properly competitive and to fear no tracks,” he said. “I think that the specifics of this circuit [Montreal] might make our fans think prematurely that we’re already there. This circuit has quite a low range of cornering speeds in it, and it tests the car maybe slightly less severely than some of the others that are coming up.
“While I’m pretty sure that we will make a good showing in the nearby future races, I’d be surprised if we’re on pole at the next round, for example. But I am absolutely certain that we can be as fast as anybody over the coming period.”
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