Mercedes has revealed it has been forced to update its Brackley design tools in a bid to fix a chronic porpoise problem affecting its 2022 F1 car.
Mercedes worked tirelessly throughout the first half of the season to understand and resolve the W13’s high-speed, high-frequency vertical movements.
The complicated issues posed by the car’s design and its effects on the ground weighed heavily on Mercedes F1’s results at the start of the 2022 season.
But early on, in an effort to rid the car of the porpoise conundrum, Mercedes F1 needed to improve its factory design tools (mainly its CFD system) to better model and understand the problem.
“We have invested in the way we work, in the way we evaluate car development,” said Andrew Shovlin, director of trackside engineering at Mercedes F1.
“And that investment meant that the car we were racing around the track wouldn’t go as fast as if it had been tuned in development.”
“But it was more about cracking the code of what was happening in these cars aerodynamically.”
“And if we could understand that, it would have been like, ‘Suddenly the lights came back on and we knew where we were going and what we wanted to chase for future performance’ in terms of development.”
Mercedes has spared no effort in trying to fix the W13’s built-in pass-through problem. Eventually, after some trial and error on the track and a return to the Brackley factory to update the design tools, the problem was greatly mitigated.
“The problem wasn’t our wind tunnel, but there was a mechanism at work that was captured neither in the modeling nor in the work. It was the porpassing mechanism,” explained Andrew Shovlin.
“So there were two things that had to be done. One was that we had to unplug it from the car. At the time[la gara di apertura della stagione 2022]it was a real distraction. It was a pain, and we had to put the limited resources into the aero department’s cost cap to figure that out.”
“It was a fantastic and relatively simple job, and it was just a matter of getting the job done.”
“Then you realize how you develop the tools you need to get back to where you were.
“It was about committing to making a complete set of parts and then getting it into the car and being confident that it would work.”
Mercedes initially thought the issue had been fixed for the Spanish Grand Prix, where they introduced floor and front wing updates, but the change opened the door for an unforeseen issue related to the stiffness of Mercedes’ W13.
Ultimately, however, steady progress continued over the summer, with George Russell taking a commanding win at the Formula 1 Brazilian Grand Prix, saving the team from a humiliating winless campaign.
