Mercedes zero-pod regret? How flawed design concept could have worked out
Andrew Shovlin believes the 'zeropod' concept could have been made work with the team's current knowledge.
Mercedes’ Andrew Shovlin believes the tricky ‘zeropod’ concept could have been made work if approached with the team’s current knowledge.
Mercedes embarked on the current ground-effect regulations in 2022 with an audacious ‘zero-sidepod’ concept that proved troublesome for the team to get on top of, resulting in a change of concept for 2024.
Andrew Shovlin: The sidepods weren’t the biggest issue
Former technical director Mike Elliott had developed the concept for the ‘zeropod’ Mercedes but, from the get-go, Mercedes struggled with extreme levels of porpoising and bouncing that required higher ride heights to alleviate – resulting in a corresponding drop in downforce from the ground-effect machine.
Having toiled away for two seasons attempting to unlock the promising concept, Mercedes called it quits and switched to a more conventional concept for 2024 – personnel changes having occurred at the team last year as Elliott swapped roles with chief technical officer James Allison before Elliott departed the team entirely.
Under Allison, now back in the technical director role he’d held between 2016 and ’21, the W15’s concept has resulted in a much more competitive season with the car ending the first half of the season as the class of the field in Belgium as George Russell and Lewis Hamilton claimed a 1-2 finish (before Russell was disqualified).
Having seemingly got to grips with how to develop a competitively fast car with a wide operating window, something that has eluded Mercedes over the past two years, head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin has said that the tricky ‘zeropod’ concept is something that could now be tackled with greater success – given the knowledge the team has gathered over the past two years.
“Yes, in the sense that if any team knew what they knew now and were able to jump back to 2021 and have another go at it,” he told select media, including PlanetF1.com, in Belgium.
“They would have the fastest car because every team has had to go through a significant learning phase.
“In that sense, we could have got those side pods to work.”
But, despite this, Shovlin dismissed the possibility that this path is one that could be re-assessed, saying the current concept and development path has yielded greater results than what the ‘zeropod’ indicated.
“Would they have had the same performance as the current design of the car? Maybe not,” he said.
“But [the sidepods] weren’t actually the biggest thing that was wrong with that car, there were other things that, if we were allowed to fix two things, probably the side pods wouldn’t have been on that list.
“However, where we are now is clearly a more performant solution.”
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Having spent 2022 and ’23 flailing around seeking solutions for the various handling and performance issues that beleaguered the Mercedes cars, Shovlin admitted there had been some “trial and error” in the team’s approach, particularly as unforeseen issues emerged that hadn’t been spotted in the R&D phases of development.
“Well, there will always be an element of trial and error because Formula 1 cars are the product of research, and not all research proves correct,” he said.
“You’re basing it on theories around how you think the aerodynamics work, the tyres work, and what’s important in terms of vehicle dynamics – you’re constantly trying to get your models to better reflect the car on the track.
“So I think there’ll always be an element of trial and error, our issue was more that we were being caught out with problems that we hadn’t anticipated well enough.
“That has been one of the big challenges. But, if you just look at the way that the performance of teams is moving around at the moment, it’s evident that no one understands everything that there is to know about the current generation of cars.”
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