How has Mercedes fallen behind rivals once again in 2024?

For the third season in a row, Lewis Hamilton struggled to hide his disappointment with his Mercedes car following the second round of the Formula One campaign in Saudi Arabia.

“We have definitely got to make some big changes,” he told Sky Sports after finishing in ninth place. “We haven’t made big enough changes, perhaps. If you look at the three teams ahead of us, they still have a different concept to where we are in some areas. So we have got some performance to add, for sure.”

For the most part, the noises coming from Mercedes during this year’s preseason had been cautiously optimistic. The team appeared confident that it had finally navigated its way out of the developmental cul-de-sac of the previous two seasons, and initial impressions from Bahrain testing were that the W15 would be a much better platform on which to build performance.

After two races with the new car, though, it’s clear Mercedes is not where it wants to be.

Based purely on points scored — which, granted, only tell part of the story — Mercedes is already 12 points shy of where it was at the same stage in 2022 and 2023. While the situation may not be as bad as that statistic suggests, there are significant issues the team must address ahead of the next two rounds in Melbourne and Suzuka.

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At the first race in Bahrain, an overheating issue was to blame for the lacklustre race performance, costing the drivers more than 0.5 in time per lap. But in Saudi Arabia, the car ran reliably and was simply lacking performance to its rivals.

In high-speed corners, which make up a large proportion of the lap in Jeddah, the W15 was losing significant time. In the first sector alone, Hamilton and teammate George Russell were 0.4s down on Max Verstappen‘s Red Bull and also a good chunk slower than the Ferraris and McLarens. Over the entire lap, Russell (the fastest of the two Mercedes) was 0.844s shy of Verstappen’s pole lap.

Through Turns 6 to 8 in sector one, the car was bouncing in a way that brought back unwanted memories of the problems Mercedes faced in the first year of the current regulation cycle.

Since F1’s rules revolution in 2022, the airflow underneath the car has become the key to generating downforce, but to extract the most from it the car has to run incredibly low to the ground. The faster the car goes, the more downforce it has acting upon it and the closer it gets to the ground, which in theory can produce even more downforce, but only if the suspension can maintain a stable platform for the car.

In Jeddah, the Mercedes was striking the ground in qualifying and visibly bouncing as it drove through Turns 6, 7 and 8, making the handling of the car unpredictable and compromising its aerodynamic performance. On top of that, the drivers were never happy with the balance of the car at high speeds, finding that it had a propensity to snap into oversteer.

It’s an issue Mercedes has laser focused its attention on since returning to base this week.

“There were a few things [that were causing the lack of performance in high-speed corners],” Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin said in a YouTube video released on Wednesday. “One of them was the balance wasn’t great. In those very fast corners, the walls aren’t particularly far away, so the ones where the driver wants a lot of confidence, and quite often we were snapping to oversteer if they really leant on the tyres. You can easily imagine how unsettling that is for the drivers — that was a factor in a qualifying and the race.

“In qualifying we were also suffering a bit with the bouncing, but that was less of a problem in the race. There’s more fuel on the car, you’re going a bit slower and that seemed to calm down and wasn’t such an issue.

“Then the big one is we don’t really have enough grip there.”

It was clear from just looking at the Mercedes in Jeddah that the team opted to run a relatively low-downforce and slim rear wing compared to its competitors. The team had hoped the downforce generated by the underside of the car would allow it to run the skinny wing, which in turn would offer less drag on the straights and higher top speeds.

While it’s true the car had plenty of straight-line speed in Jeddah — it was one of the reasons Hamilton was able to keep the faster McLaren of Oscar Piastri behind him before his pit stop — the bouncing issue meant its floor wasn’t living up to its side of the bargain in high-speed corners.

“We can see from the sensors that we have what we needed,” team boss Toto Wolff said after the race. “But there is still this behaviour of the car in a certain speed range that our sensors and simulations say this is where we should have the downforce and we are not having it.”

In final practice ahead of qualifying, Hamilton experimented by running a higher ride height to stop the bouncing while using a bigger rear wing to compensate for the lost downforce from the floor. However, the experiment resulted in no gain through high-speed corners while adding drag to the car that reduced its top speed.

“We learned there is a bigger factor with a lack of high-speed cornering performance than just the rear wing,” Wolff said. “We are missing downforce beyond the steps that you would have with a bigger rear wing.

“We tried that with Lewis and there is something that we don’t understand, because we are quick everywhere else pretty much and we know that we have a smaller rear wing we are compensating what we are losing through the corners, but it’s just the high speed where we are losing all the lap time.”

Shovlin added: “We were actually one of the fastest cars, if not the fastest car, in a straight line, so we were on quite a light wing level. What we could do is slow ourselves down in sector two and three [where the car was quick on the straights] to try and recover a bit of that time in sector one [in high-speed corners], but ideally we’d like to keep that and work out a way to try and improve sector one by means other than just putting a load more downforce on the car and then paying the price for it on the straights.”

On the face of it, Mercedes appears to have made one step forward and two steps back with this year’s car. Some of the unwanted handling characteristics of last season’s W14 have been neutralised, but some of the problems it faced in 2022 when running the car low to the ground have resurfaced.

Yet Wolff, who was ready to write off last year’s Mercedes following its first qualifying session, is remaining calm about the situation.

“I have changed my mindset,” he said on Saturday evening after the disappointing performance in Jeddah. “I don’t think that additional pressure on all of us makes it better.

“I think we have a problem with the physics, it is not by lack of trying or by the mindset, motivation or energy. All of that is there and I can see the buzz in the organisation.

“As racers, when you have such results, you feel down but we are trying to change that in the right motivation for the week that comes. That’s why we have got to believe that we can turn this round, believe that our organisation can dig ourselves out and I am 100% sure we can.”

That process has already started. Shovlin said the team is planning experiments for the three practice sessions ahead of the Australian Grand Prix to solve, or at least better understand, the issues.

Although Melbourne is often considered a relatively slow-speed track, recent changes to the layout have increased the number of high-speed corners, while the general increase in performance of modern F1 cars means there are only a couple of corners that can be considered low-speed. Along with Suzuka two weeks after, the two circuits could provide a breakthrough moment for Mercedes or a very bruising reality check.

“There’s definitely data that we’re picking through from Jeddah,” Shovlin said. “We’re also looking at data from the Bahrain race and the Bahrain test and we’ll come up with a plan for how we approach free practice in Melbourne.

“But it’s not just based on what we did in Jeddah. There’s a lot of work going on within the aerodynamics department, vehicle dynamics department, we’re trying to design some experiments there that will hopefully give us a direction that’s good for performance.”