In order to maintain the dignity and legacy that Mercedes had in Formula One, the team needs to do some real hard work before the 2023 season arrives. No doubt, the Brackley-based Mercedes factory is working 24×7. Whatever happened in 2022 should not get repeated again in 2023. Otherwise, Red Bull will definitely start their domination, replacing Mercedes. The W13, one of the cars that faced porpoising issues.
It took Lewis Hamilton’s winning streaks and broke several personal records. After the ended, the seven-time world champion denied sitting in the car even for the test running. Now, if Mercedes wants their driver to drive in 2023, they will need to provide him with a different car.
The main reason why team Mercedes had to suffer in 2022 is the end of the turbo hybrid era and the introduction of the ground effect technical regulations. As the rules changed, Mercedes failed to adapt it and could not make a strong car. The W13 version could not find the pace. As a result, the drivers, Lewis Hamilton and George Russell remained out of the title contention. For the entire season, W13 was analyzed, and the team kept on figuring out where they did wrong. Finally, some of the issues were trapped. And an upgrade was launched that ultimately paved the way for winning the Brazilian Grand Prix with a one-two finish.
One CFD Analysis Needs $20,000, Mercedes Went Through Several.
The launch of the front wings upgrade came with a massive investment in the factory. According to Mercedes engineering head Andrew Shovlin, the very first thing that was changed in order to make a better car than W13 is the CDF (Computational Fluid Dynamics). After going through the season’s performance, they figured out that the Virtual Win Tunnel System needed to be worked on. Andrew knew that if the team wanted to build a stronger car for 2023, they need to know what the problem was before going for any kind of development.
The porpoising issues continued prevailing in the 2022 season. Therefore, the team suspected that the “Wind Tunnel” is something that needs to be kept in mind. The engineers went through a lot of experiments with the Wind tunnel parts. They even tried to blow wind over a real object in a controlled environment. However, these experiments were difficult for Mercedes because they had never felt the porpoising issues before.
Nevertheless, for the overall development, Mercedes had to upgrade the CFD system of W13. This was apparently expensive because the cost of a simple 2D analysis was around $2,000. And the cost of the complex aerodynamics analysis is around $20,000. This is not even a problem for Mercedes, the main issue comes when the analysis demands repetitions. To get the perfect result, the team needed to go for analysis several times, which must have cost a million.
