Mercedes will head to Austin next week with one final upgrade for its W13 in its crates, to hopefully produce performance gains but also to accumulate more learnings for next season.
The aerodynamic complexities of Mercedes’ 2022 car and the troubles they spawned threw a massive curve ball to the Brackley squad’s engineers who have spent their year tirelessly trying to understand and solve their design’s problematic and often erratic behaviour.
The hope of achieving a step forward in the wake of an update or fundamental set-up change was often followed by two steps backward. Nevertheless, each passing race has delivered its share of knowledge, most of which has been canvassed and channeled towards next year’s contender.
And Austin’s update will hopefully deliver another round of learnings for Mercedes’ architects.
“It’s our final step of aero development and that will hopefully give us a bit more performance but importantly with every step, we are learning more and more and that learning we can carry into next year,” said Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ Trackside Engineering Director
“So that’s part of it, also there is a few bits where we have taken some weight out of components that will hopefully get the car closer to the weight limit.
“It’s very difficult for us to predict where we are going to be. In Singapore Lewis was awfully close to pole position, yet in Suzuka both cars had a big gap to the front.
“Now, our race pace has been reasonably strong, so, if we can make a step hopefully, we can get into the fight with the Ferraris and the Red Bulls but qualifying for us is the really difficult one to predict at the moment.
“But as I said a lot of it is about learning and we are certainly going to give it our best shot in the final four races.”
Shovlin admitted that The Circuit of the Americas is a tricky track to master. Last year, many drivers complained about the circuit’s many bumps, which compelled Austin’s organisers to resurface certain areas of the track, a change that Shovlin hopes will help Mercedes’ cause next week.
“It's a tricky circuit and it was a tricky circuit for us last year. It was very bumpy, there was a lot of overheating as well from the tyres, and we weren’t performing as well as Red Bull were on the softer tyres,” added the British engineer.
“They have done some resurfacing so hopefully those issues with the bumps are a bit less. But what's very hard this year is to really know where you are going to be on the circuit before you've gone there.
“We will not really be going to make any predictions about where we are going to perform, we just need to go there on Friday, see what kind of issues we have, and then see whether we can solve those with set-up.”
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