Mercedes is hopeful Monza will be “nowhere near” as punishing for its 2022 Formula 1 car’s straightline speed performance as Spa was two weeks ago.
The world champion team heads into the Italian Grand Prix weekend off the back of a highly competitive Dutch round that highlighted the W13’s dependence on favourable track characteristics.
Just one week before Lewis Hamilton fought for victory in the Netherlands, he and team-mate George Russell were well off the pace at the Belgian Grand Prix.
Monza is even more dependent on straightline speed than Spa was but while a Zandvoort-esque performance level might not be possible, the team is optimistic that it can avoid a return to struggling as much as it did in Belgium.
“We can run smaller wings but if we run smaller wings we got a bit less downforce and we are optimistic that some of the specific problems we had in Spa over the bumps shouldn’t affect us,” said trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin in Mercedes’ Dutch GP debrief video.
“So, we think we can get the car in a better working window.
“However, the Red Bull does look very efficient, it’s fast on the straights and it’s quick in the corners and those problems seem bigger for us when we go to the low downforce tracks.
“It is difficult to say exactly where we will be but probably not as strong as we were in Zandvoort but hopefully nowhere near as difficult as it was in Spa.”
Mercedes has generally struggled for one-lap performance this season but it has suffered most on circuits where it has not been able to run its car as low as it would like.
The W13 does not seem to have a wide working range in terms of producing downforce at different ride heights.
This was in evidence at Spa where the team had to raise the car to cope with the circuit’s bumps, particularly the compression at Eau Rouge, and then ran a bigger wing than it wanted to try to recapture some lost downforce.
By comparison, Zandvoort required a higher downforce set-up similar to Hungary – where Mercedes scored its only pole position in 2022.
And even if Monza is tougher, Mercedes thinks there are other circuits at which it can extract more potential from its car before the season ends.
“There is always a number of factors at play,” said Shovlin.
“One of them is that we’ve just been developing the car, trying to solve a few of those problems that we had early in the season and as time has gone on, we’ve been getting quicker and quicker.
“However, you will have seen in Spa we definitely struggled particularly on a single lap and we’ve identified some areas in terms of where we have taken the car to in its development that make it difficult to run it in its optimum condition at those tracks.
“In Spa we had to lift the car a bit, we were struggling with it on some of the bumps and the net effect was that it was costing us performance.
“Zandvoort, the car was easier to get into the right window. It was riding well, it wasn’t bouncing over the bumps.
“That gave the drivers confidence and they could push it and actually we probably had our most competitive weekend when you look at qualifying and race that we had all year.
“So, that was definitely encouraging but hopefully we will have more of those circuits to come.”
