MPH: Mercedes upgrade points to a bigger fight at US Grand Prix

Mercedes arrives in Austin this weekend with a totally new floor, an update which Lewis Hamilton describes as, “Our last big update, the biggest of the large updates through the season, and I’m really excited to see how it feels.”

Technical chief James Allison has said that although they expect it to be a little quicker, its real value will be if it confirms the direction of travel of the team’s understanding.

Meanwhile Carlos Sainz has been pondering how come Ferrari is this year, “suddenly half a second off Red Bull? Why at other circuits we were nearly on pole?”. He spoke of “understanding what was going on and what Red Bull had done to all of us, which was to, all of a sudden, dominate the way they were doing.”

In assessing the Mercedes and Ferrari seasons it’s difficult not to conclude that Red Bull simply developed a concept for the ground-effect regs introduced last year which was right at the first attempt. While the two biggest rival teams not only came up with very different solutions a year ago, but stuck with them into this year – and thereby made Red Bull’s task in maintaining an advantage (despite its mandated resource restrictions) much simpler than it was expecting. To the extent that the advantage actually increased.

Make no mistake, the Red Bull RB19 will go down as one of the great F1 cars in history. But its advantage has been amplified by what appear to be built-in limitations of the basic concepts from the two teams which should have formed the most potent challenge.

We can expect much more Red Bull-like cars from Mercedes and Ferrari next year. But why this is happening a year late is an intriguing question. The reasons were different in each case. Ferrari’s outwash-focused aerodynamics worked very effectively immediately. Recall that the ’22 car was initially probably even slightly faster than the Red Bull, before the RB18 went on its crash diet. That this coincided with Ferrari having to turn down its engines to protect an underlying mechanical issue which couldn’t be fixed until this year only muddied the waters further. But essentially Ferrari felt no reason to believe its aero concept was inherently limited. But it was. There was far more potential to develop Red Bull’s heavy undercut concept, even if that did entail lifting some mechanical components higher. Ferrari’s initial car was pretty good but the concept just did not have as much development potential. Ironically, its promise set the team in the wrong direction. That much has been acknowledged now.