Mercedes will look to Aston Martin for ideas to “identify” possible changes to its 2023 Formula 1 car, according to team principal Toto Wolff.
Wolff has asked his technical team to evaluate potential new development avenues that could unlock greater performance potential to the extent that this could lead to a concept change.
This follows his admission that the current pack, and the more advanced version currently at Brackley, will not be strong enough to meet the team’s goal of consistently fighting up front.
Mercedes were beaten in both qualifying and the race by Aston Martin in Bahrain. The AMR23 uses Mercedes’ power unit, gearbox, hydraulics and rear suspension, so both teams share the same rear end. In addition, Aston Martin uses the Mercedes F1 wind tunnel while it awaits the completion of its new state-of-the-art facility, which will come online next year.
“It’s just radical,” Wolff told Sky Sports F1 when asked about Aston Martin’s performance. “They deserve to be where they are because they have done a fantastic job.
“The good news is that there are a lot of Mercedes in there, so we know exactly where to find him. That will be helpful for the recovery.”
This does not mean that Mercedes will simply copy Aston Martin or that any kind of aerodynamic design information will be shared, as that is illegal. What Wolff means is that, with Aston Martin following the Red Bull concept that has become rigorous under these new rules, it shows that it can work with the rear of the car.
Aston Martin started last year with a car that also suffered major bounces and porpoises before changing course with a major sidepod update in May, so it’s a car born from a similar path to the one Mercedes is on. walking As Lewis Hamilton said after the Bahrain Grand Prix, “Half of his car is ours and they do their aerodynamics in our wind tunnel, so we have work to do.”
So it makes sense for Mercedes to take a close look at what Aston Martin is doing to understand if there are lessons to be learned. So will the other eight cars on the grid, given the desire to get the concept right, not only with improved performance right now, but also with greater potential for long-term development.
Wolff described Red Bull’s deficit as double or triple what it was at the end of last season. That is why Mercedes is now evaluating a change in development direction in order to unlock greater performance potential.
“That’s a good question and we’ll address it directly at the start of the week,” Wolff said when asked what the next step is for Mercedes.
“When you look at where we were at the end of the season, where we seemed to catch up a lot and it was just a matter of which circuits suited us and which didn’t, it looks like we’ve almost doubled, if not tripled the gap to Red Bull. That’s what we have to look at.
“Everything in between – Ferrari, Aston – that’s just a sideshow. Having said that, what Aston Martin achieved is a good inspiration because they came back from two seconds off the pace to be the second fastest team .
“Everything is wrong. The single-lap pace is still good, but in the race we saw the consequences and, to put it bluntly, we lack a lot of aerodynamics and we slide the tires and go backwards.”
While Wolff framed the recovery work as starting “in the next few days” given there were concerns about the car’s relative competitiveness over the winter, he acknowledged that other ideas were already being evaluated.
This is standard practice for all teams, as Mercedes are known to have experimented with more Red Bull-like sidepod geometry in CFD and the wind tunnel, but without generating the numbers to commit to a change of direction . But the team will likely have already increased the amount of effort put into exploring these directions. This could lead him to join the ranks of the up-and-comers following the Red Bull concept. As Sergio Pérez joked referring to Alonso’s third place, “it’s a pleasure to see three Red Bull cars on the podium”.
“We’ve looked at other ideas and we haven’t sat still,” Wolff said when asked by The Race about the timeline for realizing it was in trouble and whether additional resources had already been diverted to explore alternative avenues.
“It’s not just two weeks ago [ago] when we saw that we had not been able to close the gap. We’ve done it for a while just to keep an open mind.
“Still with an emphasis on doing this [existing car] work, obviously, but we have already looked at different concepts”.
It is clear that the update planned for Imola, which the team has suggested will change the look of the car but which technical director Mike Elliott said would remain very much in the Mercedes direction, will not be enough.
But the priority for Mercedes is finding management that can “make the data work and, most importantly, re-establish a solid baseline,” as Wolff puts it.
The clear implication is that Mercedes has focused and relied so heavily on this concept car that it may have failed to recognize the greater performance potential in other directions. But the problem is that if wind tunnel and CFD data don’t validate alternative pathways, the team needs to understand exactly what factors they’re missing if they want to turn things around.
“We set ourselves very high goals and we reached them,” Wolff said. “It’s where we set the goals, collectively, and how we need to change the perspective, which is an interesting perspective and something I’m looking forward to.
“I would prefer to win every race and continue to win championship after championship, but this is now the real challenge and for me it is interesting, as painful as it is today.”
The phrase “shift perspective” seems to be the key here. Mercedes will expand its horizons with the development of the car in the coming months and whether that means a radically different visual change or something more subtle, and both are possible given that it is the performance on the ground that is critical, it is clear that in seeing this problem with a different mindset could be key to making the right changes.
