Mercedes admit they still aren’t sure the new floor they introduced at the Belgian Grand Prix is working as intended.
The team’s cars finished seventh and eighth at Zandvoort, the first time they ran the new floor in a race. The drivers described the car’s handling as difficult and after the race Lewis Hamilton said they needed to look into “whether our upgrade is actually delivering or not.”
Mercedes’ technical director James Allison admitted they still “don’t fully know” whether the floor is performing as it should.
“You can take some straightforward measurements and say the downforce it was supposed to deliver looked like it was there,” he said in a video released by the team. “So at one level you could take comfort that it worked as expected.
“But a lot of the pace of the cars, in this year particularly, is down to how well they handle. So it’s not just a question of does your aero package deliver you downforce, but is it delivering you the balanced car that you need through the corners? Is it delivering you the balanced car you need from high-speed to low-speed?
“We definitely know that we didn’t have a well-balanced car this weekend. That’s where most of our pace went. Whether that was the new floor, the new aero package or not, we need to keep an open mind and it’s something we will need to revisit in future races.
“So right now, we know it measured the downforce, but we’re not certain that it delivered good balance. Something we need to investigate as we go on through the year.”
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Mercedes won three of the four rounds before they raced with the new floor. Allison said the team hadn’t got the set-up right at Zandvoort.
“It won’t be as simple as the track doesn’t suit the car. Whether or not you have a good weekend is dependent on a huge number of things and all of them have to be pretty much near dead-on right to get what you call the true pace of the car out.
“In the run up to the shutdown, we managed to hit our stride pretty much at every track. We sort of went a little bit off the rails in Spa, but managed to pull it back just in time.
“This weekend in Zandvoort, with the weather the way it was on the Friday and the decisions we took overnight, we just didn’t manage to get into the groove that we needed to get the best from the car. And small mistakes, small errors in set-up will turn you from being really quite competitive into quite mediocre. It’s tight at the top and we didn’t get it right this weekend and had a mediocre result as a consequence.”
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2024 Dutch Grand Prix
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