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Mercedes technical director Mike Elliott feels that Mercedes could get back to being competitive at the front of the grid very soon. The German team currently finds itself at third, a fair distance away from championship leader Ferrari by 53 points. The car is currently the third-fastest on the grid and is a clear step below the frontrunners in terms of performance.
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Elliot, however, feels that with the effort that is being made in the background, it's only a matter of time before his team is at par with the front-runners. He said:
“The experiments we were doing on track trying to understand the bouncing, we gathered a lot of data, we gathered a lot of data on Friday when we had strong performance and we gathered data through the race and as always, the engineers are pouring through that gaining understanding. In fact, every time we run the car we learn something new and that is the aim of the game, the game is to try and understand the car faster than our competitors.”
Conceding that the Brackley-based outfit is behind the other teams, the British engineer said:
“Although at the moment we are on the backfoot a little bit with that, there is a huge amount of effort, a huge amount of work going in trying to understand how we improve the car, how do we find that next little step forward, how do we get rid of the bouncing, how do we get back to being competitive or competitive relative to the front-running team which is where we want to be.”
Mercedes' Miami upgrade was for performance, not for bouncing!
The upgrade brought by Mercedes to Miami did appear to have a somewhat positive impact, with George Russell being able to put together some impressive laps on Friday. According to Mike Elliot, though, those upgrades were specifically introduced to help car performance and were not focused on the porpoising effect.
He said:
“I think it is important to differentiate two things. One is the normal upgrade path and the other one is fixing the issues that we are having with bouncing and other things that are compromising the performance. The wings were part of the former. The wings that we brought definitely brought us the performance that we were expecting and were a step forward.”
The upgrade package at the Spanish GP is one that Mercedes will be keeping an eye on because if that one doesn't work, the German team might just have to write off the 2022 season and switch focus to the next.
