Mercedes call W13 ‘annoying’ for showing glimpses of strong form

Andy Shovlin has called Mercedes’ W13 “particularly annoying” as it gives the team glimpses of what could be when it comes to performance – but there is no consistency.

Mercedes wrapped up the first part of the championship with their best result of the season when George Russell secured pole position in Hungary and he and Lewis Hamilton followed that up with a double podium.

While their second and third places on the day, Hamilton ahead of Russell, were Mercedes’ second double podium in as many races, the pole position was a new one for the team as, up until the Hungarian Grand Prix, the W13 had not shown front-row pace.

“This car has been particularly annoying in the way it gives you glimpses of performance and what might be, to a level that it’s very difficult for us just to give up on it,” he said as per Motorsport.com.

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“So it sucks you in a bit, from an engineering point of view,” he continued, “it has been a tricky car.

“And certainly some of the issue is just that we haven’t got enough downforce, we need to find more downforce, and find a bit more power. But overall it is a useful sign that we’re going in the right direction.

“The double podium, the pole position, they’re all things that we could have only dreamed of earlier in the year. And that’s encouraging, that we do seem to be making progress.”

The W13’s lack of downforce is largely because Mercedes have had to raise the car’s ride-height in order to minimise the extreme bouncing that was not only hurting their results, but also their drivers.

Seeming to be on top of that issue, Mercedes are working on getting their zero-pod design into the performance window that their engineers and design staff believe is possible from the data back in the wind tunnel.

“I think it has been useful to see that this narrow bodywork car can perform well in races,” Shovlin said.

“This is certainly the thing for us to take as a foundation for development. We will be more effective if we work with what we’ve got than try and hop to someone else’s design.

“But the sidepods are probably a bit of a distraction from the overall issues that we’ve had to fix. If you think it’s only three races ago we were bouncing around all over the place in Montreal, Baku, Monaco.

“Now the drivers are getting out and if they talk about bouncing, it’s because they had a little bit of it in one corner at one point. It’s almost notable by its absence. And we’ve been able to apply those improvements to the current package, which is a good sign.”

Mercedes sticking with the zero-pod philosophy

Speaking to F1’s media back in May, Toto Wolff concede that with extreme bouncing and poor results, at least by their standards, Mercedes were considering reverting to the fatter sidepods that they ran in the first pre-season test.

He was, though, loathed to make the change too early saying Mercedes needed to give their brains’ trust “the benefit of the doubt”, adding that they “believe this is the route to go down”.

Mercedes are beginning to reap the rewards.

Hamilton is the only driver to have featured on the podium in every one of the last five races, Russell joining him twice with Mercedes the only team in those five races to have put both drivers into the top three – and they’ve done it twice.

However, it must be noted that the W13 is still chasing its first grand prix win of the championship.

Although Hungary was a fantastic result for the team, especially as the car had previously shown good race pace but has fallen short in qualifying, Wolff was the first to admit after Russell’s pole that the team was a bit perplexed as to why he was P1.

“It’s also a big surprise for us,” Wolff told Sky Sports. “I told the engineers to quickly write down everything they did so that we don’t forget it.”

It is that erratic performance from the car that has let Mercedes down this season, both drivers conceding that steps forward are followed by leaps backward.

It does, however, seem that it is only a matter of time before Mercedes get it right. And when they do, the rest of the grid beware.