How Mercedes finally tamed its victorious W13 beast

F1

The W13 once seemed an unmanageable F1 machine, but now Mercedes has harnessed its power to win for the first time this season at the 2022 Brazilian Grand Prix, as Mark Hughes explains

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Will intra-team Merc battle become story of 2023?

Mercedes

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George Russell is a now a grand prix winner. Mercedes has finally won a race in 2022. They did not luck into it; it was a commanding performance through the Interlagos weekend. The foundation was Russell’s sprint victory of Saturday and the P1 starting position that gave him for the main event. An off-form Red Bull meant that Russell’s main competition was team-mate Lewis Hamilton who, after clashing with Max Verstappen and losing six places, fought his way back up to second. But even a late race safety car restart, with Hamilton tight in his wheel tracks, wasn’t enough to blow Russell off course. There was also a water leak from around half-distance, but he knew nothing of that until after the race as the team elected not to tell him. He already had enough to think about.

 

Merc’s building advantage

The Mercedes W13 has looked a much more potent threat ever since its Austin upgrade which combined a tweaked front wing and floor with a significant weight reduction. That combined with the team’s better understanding of the narrow set-up window in which it must run the car is what saw Hamilton a threat to Verstappen for a time in Austin, Russell a pole contender in Mexico. It’s always been good on the tyres but that didn’t really mean much when Red Bull and Ferrari were so far ahead. But it suddenly matters a lot when the car is somewhere near the pace.

The reason why it’s good on the tyres in the race is also why it can struggle to get them up to temperature in qualifying on the first lap. But with the sprint format, the starting positions for the Grand Prix weren’t wholly determined by its single lap performance. In qualifying for the sprint Russell and Hamilton (who was running a lower downforce wing than Russell) had qualified only third and eighth in the single lap window of Q3. In the drier Q2 session, they’d been only fourth and ninth, 0.5sec adrift of Verstappen’s Red Bull. That trait is still there.

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Austin tweak has made Mercedes a much stronger threat

Mercedes

But in the sprint itself, they were first and third. With the Ferrari of second-place sprint finisher Carlos Sainz taking a five-place PU grid penalty, that made it an all-Mercedes front row. Great tyre behaviour and the front row was a formidable combination.

 

Red Bull’s struggles

But Mercedes was not beating a fully on-form, happy, Red Bull. The RB18 was struggling for a front end, especially as the track cooled and the rears began to push the front on. “We’ve just got way too much front deg no matter which tyre we are on,” said Verstappen on Saturday.

Believing that even 24 laps would be too much for a set of softs with that level of degradation, Red Bull put him on mediums for his front row start alongside Kevin Magnussen’s pole-setting Haas. He was leading by lap two, but as soon as Russell, Sainz and Hamilton also threaded their way around the Haas, the game was up for Verstappen. “We thought he’d struggle a bit in the early laps bringing the mediums up to temperature,” related Christian Horner, “but then he’d pull away. But he just got even worse deg!”

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Red Bulls struggled for front-end grip

Red Bull

The medium was not a great tyre around here, the soft far superior, faster and with a comparable range. Everyone bar Verstappen (and Nicholas Latifi) used it for the sprint. The medium made the Red Bull look worse than it was on Saturday – but it still wasn’t great.

At least Verstappen’s use of the medium for the sprint ensured he had two sets of new softs for what was set to be a two-stop race on Sunday. Ordinarily, that might have been considered a potent advantage over two Mercs which had only one new and one scrubbed set each. But not if the tyre deg was too high and you were starting from the row behind.

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Although team-mate Sergio Perez lined up alongside Verstappen on the second row, he was in even worse shape. With only one set of softs he was going to be obliged to run a soft/medium/medium sequence and the medium was set to be just as bad as it had been on Saturday.

The restart from a first lap safety car was a great opportunity for Verstappen to pounce upon Hamilton’s second place, but there was no co-operation available from Hamilton to allow his move in the Senna Esses to work and they inevitably collided once more. Restarting near the back after taking on a new nose, Verstappen’s pace as he came through was strong but not dazzling. The late safety car (for Lando Norris’s broken-down McLaren) allowed him to pick off Esteban Ocon, Sebastian Vettel and Valtteri Bottas. As he chased Fernando Alonso’s fifth place, Perez was instructed to let him by. When Verstappen failed to catch Alonso he was supposed to give the place back to Perez but for his own reasons refused to.

 

Ferrari?

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Ferrari ultimately secured third and fourth for Carlos Sainz and Charles Leclerc respectively

Ferrari

Ferrari partly took itself out of the equation by sending out Charles Leclerc on inters in Q3 on a slicks-ready track, with the rain arriving a couple of laps too late. That left him starting 10th. From there to sixth and from there to the Turn 8 barriers after being clipped by Norris and from there to the pitlane for a new nose and tyres, rejoining last.

After making steady progress through the field, his distant sixth was converted into an opportunistic fourth, his pass on Perez (his rival for runner-up in the championship) aided by a big tyre advantage because of the latter’s mediums.

Sainz’s podium was well deserved from seventh on the grid, an early stop to have a visor tear-off removed from a brake duct obliging him to three-stop, but with better pace than Perez and the help of the safety car there was no stopping him from prevailing in that battle.

 

Best of the rest

This was variously Norris, Vettel, Alonso (great pace from near the back), Bottas, and finally Alonso again. With Ocon also in the points and both McLarens retiring, Alpine has fourth place in the constructors’ within its grasp.