Mercedes Revives Spa Floor Design for Zandvoort Test

Mercedes F1 has not shelved its Spa innovations, planning a comeback trial at Zandvoort after initial setbacks.

Mercedes F1 has not abandoned its evolution introduced at Spa-Francorchamps, featuring a completely revised floor, which was shelved after the free practice sessions at the Belgian Grand Prix. Andrew Shovlin, the trackside engineering director, confirms that the team will test it again to try to understand it.

“We plan to do so,” he stated. “The reason we reverted the car to the Silverstone specs on Friday night is that we had a good race at Silverstone, where Lewis won.”

“Spa and Silverstone are not radically different in terms of cornering speed. We clearly introduced issues somewhere. We think it’s largely due to how we were running the car at Spa, not the evolutions themselves.”

“This was causing some rebound in high-speed corners, as well as some balance issues. Switching to the Silverstone car brought things back to normal. Since then, we’ve had time to look at the data to understand what we had done, and we are quite confident about trying a reintroduction at Zandvoort.”

“Reverting to Silverstone specs was the right thing to do,” confirms Shovlin, as drivers were losing confidence due to the rebounds which made the car difficult to control in terms of grip and stability.

“One of the issues at Spa is that it’s a fast circuit that requires a lot of commitment from the driver. We reintroduced some bouncing in the car, which isn’t great for confidence in high-speed corners. There were a few other balance issues where the car lacked stability on entry.”

“When you want to brake late and carry speed into a corner, it doesn’t help. On a normal circuit, it might have cost us a little time. On a large circuit like Spa, with significant corners, it became a substantial figure.”

“The car wasn’t in a good situation, but it’s one of those things specific to Spa where if the drivers don’t have the car doing what they want, it can cost a lot of performance. It was exactly the right thing for us to revert to this known specification.”

A return of the part by Zandvoort

Toto Wolff, as George Russell had also previously thought, believes the floor itself isn’t a bad part, and it did not cause the performance loss: “I think we made a drastic change to recover some performance, but we believe it wasn’t the floor.”

“It will be very interesting when we put everything on the car at Zandvoort and do the correlations, and see what it yields. We can then be sure whether it is indeed the mechanical part we thought, or if there are some aerodynamic and mechanical interactions that did not work.”

The Austrian admits that Mercedes is in great shape, but he does not want to imagine it becoming the benchmark: “I think we need to keep our feet on the ground. As for performance variations, we see a positive trend on our side. For other teams, the trend is negative.”

“But I don’t think we should prejudge how the second half of the season will unfold. I think the competition is tough and there are four teams giving everything they have. I think we can be cautiously optimistic. But we have to prove it. There are ten races left to run.”