Mercedes has a ‘long journey ahead’ to understand ‘weak’ W12 rear-end

Mercedes admits there is a “long journey ahead” for it to understand the W12’s lack of instability during Formula 1 pre-season testing.

The Brackley-based outfit comes off the back of a troubled three-day test in Bahrain where it racked up the fewest milage out of all 10 teams.

Having lost running due to a gearbox issue on the opening day, Lewis Hamilton spun into the gravel on day two, with the Briton losing the rear of the car again on the final day when preparing for a lap.

This lead to Hamilton and team-mate Valtteri Bottas reporting to the team that the rear of W12 was “quite snappy and unforgiving”.

After analysing its setbacks from testing, Mercedes chef strategist James Vowles revealed it is still yet to get to the bottom of what was causing the problems.

“It was pretty evident from that, that the car was handling poorly, and conversely the Red Bull in fact was a very stable car especially through the last sector of the lap,” Vowles explained in a Mercedes testing debrief video.

“I think that’s a fair observation. It was visible to the outside and I would say the laptimes mirrored that as well.

“But it’s also fair to say that we don’t have answers as we are sat here now, it is just 24 hours after the end of the test. Huge amounts of data available to us and now a long journey ahead to try and understand what was causing that.”

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin said the high wind conditions would have exasperated the issue further, but recognised the team has work to do to fix the instability of the W12 with its rivals looking in better shape.

“The wind made it tricky,” Shovlin said. “When the wind is behind the car, you lose a lot of downforce because effectively the air speed is reduced, so some corners where the wind was behind, it was prone to doing that.

“Then also the tyres are quite easy to overheat on that circuit and if you start sliding, you tend to lose grip and it gets worse. So, there are a few problems.

“Importantly, we could see that some of our competitors weren’t struggling in the same way as us, so we need to put quite a focus on understanding why the rear end was a bit weak, how we can get it more stable and predictable and that work is going on now.

“Hopefully when we get to the race weekend it won’t be so difficult for the drivers because they were having to work pretty hard to do the lap times that they were doing.”