THE FALL OF MERCEDES
WHAT HAS GONE WRONG AT MERCEDES?
The team that has won a record eight consecutive constructors’ championships since the start of Formula 1’s hybrid-engine era is floundering at the start of the 2022 season.
At the time of writing, after the Australian GP, the W13 is an average of 0.847s off the pace in qualifying. Ferrari and Red Bull are in a league of their own at the front, and Lewis Hamilton appears to have no more of a chance of avenging the controversial loss of an eighth world title in Abu Dhabi last year than Max Verstappen’s new rival, Charles Leclerc, did of winning a first at the same point a year ago.
Formula 1’s much-vaunted new rules have caught Mercedes on the hop, and the team is scratching around trying to understand why it is so far off the pace, and what can be done about it.
As team principal Toto Wolff puts it: “There are deficits everywhere. We have many parts on the car that don’t work, that we don’t understand, that don’t perform enough. This is not where we expect the car to be.”
Hamilton has been even more succinct: “We need more grip and we need more power.”
So how much trouble is Mercedes in, and how likely is a recovery before this season becomes an exercise in damage limitation, and the championship a write-off?
WHO GETS GROUND EFFECT?
Before we get into that, it’s worth outlining the context for the situation in which Mercedes finds itself.
The new technical regulations
