Mercedes F1 Struggles With Ground Effect Woes

Mercedes F1’s James Allison reveals the disruptive impact of ground effects, marking a new era of challenges.

Mercedes F1 failed to recognize the weaknesses of its approach that led to producing non-competitive cars over the past two seasons, according to the team’s technical director, James Allison.

The team, which won eight consecutive constructors’ championships until 2021, has only achieved one victory over the last two seasons as it struggled to adapt to F1’s new technical regulations on ground effect. However, it has made progress with its W15 since the start of the season and won the last two races.

Allison stated that the team did not realize early enough that the structure of its technical departments prevented it from finding a solution to the problems it faced.

“The most important thing I would say, and that we could point to ourselves as a critique, is that the way we worked under the previous set of rules was very effective for that set of rules.”

“I’m not talking about how we shaped the front wing or how we managed tire drag at the rear of the car, or any particular detail. I mean the way the main groups of engineers interacted with each other within the team. So, aerodynamics with vehicle dynamics, vehicle dynamics with the track, and the track with these two groups.”

“The way we were organized in the old world worked very well. And not just well, it worked for eight seasons in a row, which no one had ever done before, it was quite impressive.”

“But we have, to a large extent, continued to work together in different circumstances and have not been sufficiently self-critical to recognize that there were inherent weaknesses in this approach in the new world of ground effect that did not matter in the old. We have certainly paid the price.”

Mercedes F1 regularly encountered problems with the bouncing of its cars as it endeavored to optimize the performance of the specific floors of these new rules.

“The cars are all so uncomfortably close to the ground in this set of rules that the suspension and aerodynamics need to be really, really, really closely linked to each other. In the old world, they needed to be cousins, but they didn’t need to be really integrated into each other’s world.”

“In fact, it would have been inefficient in the old world to spend time worrying about the interaction of one group with another in a particularly intense way, because they were somewhat orthogonal to each other, to some extent. Now, they are completely coupled and the interaction must be very tight.”