Why F1 shakedown sent Mercedes' 2022 season into a tailspin

“We were on the back foot by about a week, because our filming day was when there was a storm in the UK,” he told Motor Sport.

“And it was a wet shakedown. And we just weren’t going fast enough down the straight at Silverstone to experience any porpoising whatsoever. You could barely keep the car in a straight line, there was so much wind.

“The track got red-flagged for a couple of hours, because part of the bridge had blown off onto the circuit, to put a perspective on of how bad the conditions were!

“And it was only late in the afternoon that we experienced something, but we weren’t too sure what it was. And that was the end of the day.

“And perhaps had it been clear from that shakedown, we could have arrived at Barcelona with a couple of test items. That could have saved us a month or so of development maybe even more.

“We then ended up having to bring those to the Bahrain test, which delayed the process even further, and our learning even further. So as simple a thing as the weather probably had an impact on our development rate…”

The team had saved its “no-sidepod” bodywork package for the second test in Bahrain, just before the first race of the season.

“In Barcelona, we had a very drastically different car,” says Russell. “We obviously had the conventional bodywork. And we believed we had a substantial upgrade that we’d bring to the car. We were talking well over a second-and-a-half performance, we were expecting to bring, maybe even more.

“We left Barcelona thinking we’re four-tenths off the pace. But we’ve got, let’s say 1.7 seconds of lap time to bring to the car, knowing full well that the others will have some performance as well.

“And we got to Bahrain and realised we couldn’t utilise any of that performance whatsoever. And we had to run the car in a totally different window.”

Much of the rest of the season would be a fire-fighting exercise for Mercedes, with the porpoising problem soaking up resources that would normally have been focused totally on performance gains.

The team got there in the end to the extent that the car proved capable of getting a pole and race win, but it was still far off what was expected, as Russell noted: “How long it took to resolve porpoising, probably a good eight or nine races in itself, then understanding the issues we got into thereafter with the ride problems that we faced in our car, which we hadn’t discovered in those opening races – we were just completely in the wrong window.”

From the outside it looked like a painful season for a team that had been so used to winning and at times dominating over the previous eight years, although team boss Toto Wolff saw it a little differently.

“For me the word painful isn’t the word I would be using in a racing context,” he told Motor Sport. “The word that would be appropriate is a sense of annoyance. We started out of the blocks with something which was an undrivable car.

“And layer-by-layer, we peeled off the problems. And then we had some good weekends. And it seemed like we were on a good trajectory. You’re on pole in Budapest and 1.8 seconds off in Spa, and to cope with these oscillations is quite difficult, while knowing that the problem is more in the DNA of the car.”

Technical director Mike Elliott admitted late in 2022 that a particular decision early in the W13 design process had proved expensive, although Wolff wouldn’t elaborate when asked if it was an aero or mechanical choice.

“It is both,” said the Austrian. “It a mechanical issue linked with aero. But it’s much more complex than pointing at one single area, it’s more intertwined.

“The things that we are talking about are fundamental to the car design. So that is more a long-term issue, but bear in mind that we lost many months in trying to figure out what it is, and question marks remain of ‘have you really uncovered every weakness of the car?’”

“You simply haven’t got the possibilities anymore to just develop yourself out of it”

With a single three-day test in Bahrain coming up, and just a five-day interval before first practice for the race itself, you can see why even these initial shakedowns are so important for all of the teams. They don’t have a lot of time to get on top of any issues that emerge.

The process is complicated by a perfect storm of rules, with the cost cap and the sliding scale of tunnel and CFD usage under the FIA aero testing regulations hitting the top teams – which was exactly the intention.

That combination also helps to explain why Mercedes struggled to make much progress last year. As constructors’ champions the team had less wind tunnel time than everyone else throughout 2021, when the new era cars were being designed, and for the first half of 2022, when the porpoising issue was being chased.

“I think there’s never one explanation,” says Wolff. “I think the [aero testing] restrictions hit us because basically it was a rolling three half years in all.

“In terms of the development of the 2022 car, it was the first six months at the beginning of ’21, the second six months of ’21, and then the first six months of 2022. And you accumulate all of this.

“It gives an explanation why all the other teams had much more. And on top of that we had to restructure because of the cost cap. And as we got the physics wrong.”

After July there was a re-set based on the championship, and for the last half of 2022 Mercedes had more tunnel time than rivals Red Bull and Ferrari, as it does from now until June. The W14 should benefitted from that.

However the cost cap hits the three biggest players equally hard. Last year it ensured that Mercedes had its hands tied, and the team couldn’t just throw parts at the car and see what worked, as was the case in previous eras.

“You simply haven’t got the possibilities anymore to just develop yourself out of it,” said Wolff.

“You can’t bring new monocoques, you can’t have a B-spec car. We weren’t able to reduce our weight considerably, because it would have meant producing lots of new car bits that we couldn’t afford.

“I think it added complexity. In any case, we need to make the best out of the situation, because all of us need to adapt. So there was no choice.”

The ongoing impact of the cost cap will be one of the more intriguing features of this season.

Last year’s Red Bull penalty shows that the FIA is on the case and means business – teams now know that if they push the limits, they will have to face the consequences.

In the football world the recent news about Manchester City’s past overspending puts a fresh focus on what our own sport is trying to achieve.

The top three F1 teams have all had to restructure and in essence do more with fewer people and less money.

“We tried to get it right first time, because we believed that long term, that was important,” says Wolff. “And getting it right first time was extremely difficult, because we had to reorganise, account for parts, and account for costs that we have never done before.

“So it was a year and a half of tremendous effort. Also, for the engineers. It’s not only an accounting topic, or bookkeeping topic, but truly the engineers needed to be involved very much.

“For us it was a major restructuring, and for sure it cost us performance. Every process from purchasing a part all the way for the part to be machined and put in a car, analysing is that the right way to spend the money? Departments coming together and saying, what are we prioritising? It’s extremely time consuming.”

Those in the chasing midfield pack, likely to be led this year by the likes of McLaren, Alpine and Aston Martin, hope that the momentum the big players had from their past years of spending will gradually fade.

The top teams in particular literally cannot afford to get something wrong in the design process, or pursue a route that doesn’t work, and have to backtrack – which is why the first shakedown runs and the Bahrain test will be so important.