11/05/2022
NEWS STORY
Following another tough weekend, Toto Wolff admits that the "diva" W13 leaves his team in a quandary as to whether it sticks with its current concept or not.
While the McLaren MP4 13 was to carry Mika Hakkinen to the first of his two titles, Jordan's EJ13 didn't turn out quite so well, the Silverstone-based outfit enjoying one of its worst ever seasons, despite Giancarlo Fisichella's 'fluke' win in Brazil.
Sadly, clearly not suffering triskaidekaphobia, Mercedes took the bold decision to designate its 2022 contender the W13 and as the season progresses the car appears to be a little more Jordan than McLaren.
On Friday in Miami the German team finally appeared to have put its porpoising nightmare behind it, or at least lessen its impact.
Next day however, and for the remainder of the weekend, the home of the Miami Dolphins saw the W13's porpoising return with a vengeance.
Just five races in, Mercedes appears to be at a crossroads, and moving forward Toto Wolff is unsure whether to persist with the current concept or follow the example of McLaren in 2004 and start over.
"I wouldn't discount anything," admits the Austrian. "But we need to give all of our people that have produced great race cars in the past the benefit of the doubt and we believe this is the route to go."
Admitting that the W13 is "clearly much slower on paper", Wolff adds "we need to find out how we can make the current car work predictably for the drivers."
With Lewis Hamilton insisting that the car hasn't improved since Bahrain, the quandary facing the team is whether to continue with its minimalistic approach to its sidepods or return to the original concept as used in pre-season testing in Spain.
"Barcelona is definitely going to be a point in time where we are able to correlate with what we saw in February and gather more data," he says.
"I'm also annoyed about saying the same thing about gathering data and making experiments, but it's physics not mystics, and therefore you have to unpick the data."
Adding to the team's headache is the fact that the inability to recreate the porpoising in simulations is leading to correlation issues.
"We're not looking at the lady next door if we like it more or not, because it's still good," he says. "We need to understand, before we make a decision on another concept, where did this one go wrong? And what is the goodness of the concept and what is the badness of the concept?
"We've been straight from the beginning, flying in the fog a little bit," the Austrian admits. "It's clear there's potential in the car and she's fast, but we just don't understand how to unlock the potential.
"It's a car that is super difficult to drive on the edge, dipping in and out of the performance window more out than in," he adds. "And discussing the data with a scalpel is just a painful process because it takes very long.
"As a matter of fact, the data sometimes doesn't show what the drivers tell us. Certainly they have their hands full with a car that is just not at all comfortable, nice or predictable to drive. But the data doesn't show any of these big swings.
"We haven't had this situation before in any of the years," he sighs, "that it just didn't correlate on the screens what the driver feels and that is just making it even more difficult.
"We would be asking ourselves to get an answer after Barcelona, because that's the real correlation we have. And by then, we will look at ourselves in the mirror and say, did we get it wrong or not?"