Mercedes engine boss reveals that it wasn't only drivers Lewis Hamilton and George Russell that took a pounding when porpoising was at its worst.

Though it was evident from pre-season testing that Mercedes, like several other teams, was being compromised by the cars' bouncing it was only in Azerbaijan that we came to realise the full effect of the phenomenon.

On-board coverage had revealed the pounding the drivers were taking - Russell admitting that it had caused his vision to blur - but as Hamilton climbed from his car in obvious pain the FIA decided it was time to act.

However, many failed to realise the damage the bouncing was causing to other elements of the car, most noticeably the power unit.

"At the beginning of the season, the two big things that we had was firstly the power was going to get frozen and it was going to be a hardware freeze," says Hywel Thomas, managing director of the Mercedes High-Performance Powertrains (HPP) in a new video from Mercedes. "And that's what we were going to be using for the next three years.

"So we had a really big development programme over the whole of last year and through that winter and just trying to make sure we landed that it was a real big effort, a really, really big effort.

"When we came back from Bahrain we said: ‘How are we going to do this? How are we going to put the performance on the car from our side?' It was ‘look, we're going to have to do small gains'. At the same time, don't compromise the reliability.

"By that period of the season it was becoming clear that the engines were taking a hell of a pounding. The bottom of the engines, when you (Toto Wolff) came up to Brixworth last week and you saw some of the parts that were off the race engines, it's quite a surprise to see exactly how hard they were being hit by the ground.

"When you see Lewis and George looking a bit uncomfortable getting out of the cars, the PUs were doing much of the same," adds Thomas.

"We came out at the beginning of the season with some wobbles on the power unit," adds Wolff. "We didn't like certain aspects of the deployment or the drive-ability of the power unit. And whilst in the frozen environment, you and your team, you were able to really add on performance and cope with the difficult environment of a bouncing car that was breaking your engine.

"Still we were super-reliable and the engine was performing very well towards the middle of the season and the end."

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READERS COMMENTS

1. Posted by Defiant, 29/12/2022 19:53

"I guess this shows how a bad concept can affect many different aspects of a plan. Mercedes report card for 2022.... must do better.
Hopefully for the benefit of the sport they can give RB a worthy challenge next year. Having Merc so far ahead for so long was duuullll, then 2021 was exciting as RB had caught them, but then having RB so far ahead this year took us back to duuullll.

Throughout F1 history, whenever the rules change the racing suffers. Just as we had the teams closing in on each other and we truly have an exciting formula, boom another change comes around and we get the same boring results, just with different protagonists. I'd like to see no major revamps set into the Concorde agreement for a minimum term of 10 years."

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Porpoising broke Mercedes power units

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