Davidson: Mercedes problems won’t be solved anytime soon

Anthony Davidson, a former driver and now a Sky Sports F1 TV pundit, shared his views on the difficulties Mercedes faced at the start of the season. It’s worth listening to as Anthony works with this team as a pilot on a simulator.

The Australian Grand Prix is ​​just around the corner and the problems with the car’s destabilization at high speeds have not yet been solved, causing the Mercedes W13 to lose a lot of speed compared to Red Bull and Ferrari. Suffice it to recall that Lewis Hamilton failed to even reach the second part of qualifying in Saudi Arabia – the first since Brazil’17.

“Even in Bahrain, I noticed that Mercedes behaves differently on track than the car I knew from working on the simulator. And alarm bells went off for me right away,” Davidson said. – I think the biggest difficulty is that the team just can’t adjust the ground clearance of the car to the desired height.

I have looked at the cars of many other teams, for example for Red Bull. Their RB18 hits the underside of the track and you can see the sparks flying from underneath. In this team, they are already physically unable to reduce clearance.

In the case of Mercedes or Ferrari I have not seen this, their cars are much more prone to build up. I think Mercedes would ideally like to lower the ride height, like Red Bull did, but every time they tried, the build-up increased to a critical level, affecting the stability of the car and the speed.

And this manifested itself not only on straight lines, but also in fast corners. The car turns into an unbroken mustang and the riders don’t feel confident behind the wheel. The problem is that they know the W13 has potential, they understand that it can be done much faster, but they fail to achieve the desired settings. This is an interesting problem.

But I wouldn’t advise anyone to underestimate Lewis Hamilton. He does not give up, will continue to try to squeeze the most out of the car. I think he bet on extreme settings during qualifying in Saudi Arabia to make the car do what it needs. But in the course of the race he managed to find his rhythm.

I foresee Lewis will be able to understand the characteristics of the car and understand the approach required to drive it. Of course he is very flexible, he was quickly behind the wheel of several Formula 1 cars and I see no reason to stop him from taking an approach to this generation’s technology.

The W13 isn’t as good as the Red Bull and Ferrari cars, it doesn’t allow you to fight with the leaders, but it’s certainly faster than all the cars of the teams in the middle group – it turns out it’s in “no man’s land “. We can expect that Mercedes will be able to add, but this will only happen after some time, these kinds of problems cannot be solved quickly.”