30/03/2024
NEWS STORY
James Allison says that much of the ongoing issue with the Mercedes W15 is down to warmer track temperatures which compromise the tyres.
While the W15 is a definite improvement on its predecessors, it is no match for the Red Bull and currently lagging behind the Ferrari and McLaren.
The opening three circuits have all been entirely different, and while the events in Melbourne complicated the matter, James Allison believes that a pattern is slowly beginning to emerge.
"We are starting to see a pattern emerge that most weekends we have a period in the weekend where we are feeling confident about the car," he says in the latest team debrief.
"But then in the paying sessions, in qualifying and the race, that slips through our fingers," he admits.
"If we were trying to draw that pattern together then probably the strongest correlation that we can make at the moment, is that our competitiveness drops when the track is warm, when the day is at its warmest and therefore the tyre temperatures rise with those of the track. That gives us some clues about what we need to do as we move forward from here.
"From FP3 to qualifying in Melbourne there was not a set-up change," he adds, confirming what Toto Wolff had previously said, having admitted that the team was totally mystified by the drop in performance between the two sessions.
"If you know what you're shooting for, if you've sort of identified correctly an accurate assessment of why our competitiveness waxes and wanes, then you can work into the weekend a program that is dedicated towards trying to move the temperature and the temperature balance front to rear in your favour and using all the conventional set up tools on the car," says Allison. "That work you can do back here in the factory and the simulation and so on.
"But if you conclude having exhausted the degrees of freedom that you have available to you in setup terms that you still need to go further, well then that gets harder at that point because that will be that there are underlying characteristics in say the aerodynamic map that you've engineered or the suspension characteristic that is aggravating that particular feature, and in order to make it really heal up nicely then you would have to change those underlying features.
"It can be either quick and dirty or a little more involved and a bit more complicated."