After the Saudi Grand Prix, Lewis Hamilton said big changes needed to be made to the car. Photo: Getty Images/Rudy Carezzevoli < p>After pre-season testing, Mercedes were optimistic about the prospects for the 2024 car, the W15. The two races and their results suggest they are still suffering from an inability to overcome their limitations. This looks like a repeat of 2022 and 2023. The team must be realistic about their car and realize that it has a problem.
In some ways they are still fooling themselves and it depends on how they approach the weekend. In Bahrain and Saudi Arabia they looked competitive in the early training sessions and then fell back. This suggests that they drive lighter on Friday to give themselves confidence. As the weekend progresses, their rivals step up their efforts and Mercedes returns to its «true» position.
In terms of speed alone, they were the fifth fastest team in Jeddah. In the race, using the same tire strategy, George Russell finished 40 seconds behind race winner Max Verstappen. Lewis Hamilton finished 46 seconds behind Verstappen using a slightly different strategy, driving at medium speed for a long time and then running soft for the final 13 laps. None of the strategies worked for them. That's almost a second per lap in the race, and they were also almost a second behind the Dutchman for one lap in qualifying.
They should get back to doing more effective homework between races. than just driving a car that gets good gas mileage and looking and feeling in a good place at first. They won't learn anything this way, it's just a deceptive and short-term confidence boost.
The fact that both riders separated in its settings for the weekend in Saudi Arabia is not a good sign. Photo: Getty Images/Eric Alonso
After the race, Hamilton said that big changes needed to be made to the car. He mentioned that other teams still have different concepts, but Hamilton talks about what you see. As I've written many times, the underbody is the critical part of these cars, and Hamilton doesn't know what the other teams are doing there. What you see does not necessarily make the machine work.
He seems to think that if Mercedes makes their car like a Red Bull it will go as fast as the car, but that's not true. The W15 needs a lot more work than the visual concept, but the worry is that they still don't understand what an ekranoplan needs.
The fact that as the weekend progressed both drivers again, as in 2022, diverged in their settings is not a good sign. Hamilton has returned to his 2022 approach, trying to find the magic bullet with a setup that he hopes will find half a second out of nowhere. They're clearly still experimenting with their car, but I don't think the solution (and the jump in performance out of nowhere) is anymore in the car.
«Unstable rear end and the return of the dreaded bounce»
Why is the car so far behind pace was clear and understandable to the drivers. Hamilton said the Mercedes was decent enough at slow and medium speeds, but in the high-speed corners — of which there are many in Jeddah — it felt like it was racing in a different category with an unstable rear end and a terrible bounce on the return.
To bounce off a destroyed Mercedes in 2022 and stop it, you need to control the aerodynamic control of the car's underbody. As the car goes faster, the load increases and the car gets closer to the ground. The main problem here is that Mercedes has no philosophy for making the car work other than lowering it to the ground — but that results in bouncing. They simply don't have the right aerodynamic approach to working under the floor. They are far from Red Bull and even McLaren. A McLaren car is as close to the ground as any other, but it glides along the track rather than crashing into it, meaning they get more consistent and useful downforce.
A loose rear end also bothered Hamilton. The way the Jeddah track is set up, the last thing you want is the rear end going 190mph. The W15 was meant to address the «mean» rear end of its predecessors, and they even moved the driver's cabin rearward to give him a better feel for the rear of the car. This does not appear to be the case.
Hamilton felt he needed to use a higher level rear wing because the rear end was too «spooky» for him. That's why the McLaren felt like it was in a different league in the fast corners. Mercedes needs to find a solution to get front end grip in slow corners without sacrificing rear grip in fast corners. Every comment they make suggests that they don't have it, that the car is constantly on the cutting edge.
Mercedes and Hamilton want a refresh, just like McLaren did in 2023, which prompted them to become Red Bull's closest rival in the second half of the season. McLaren has shown that a big leap is possible. They started that season poorly, but knew exactly what needed to be improved and how. Mercedes is still far from this knowledge. I wouldn't expect anything to change for them in Australia, Japan or China.
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