How Mercedes’ Wind Tunnel Mistake Ended Their F1 Dominance

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When you think of Mercedes in Formula 1, you think of the team that won eight championships in a row, but I’ve recently learnt of one key mistake that caused all of that success to end in 2022.

Mercedes arrived at testing in Bahrain in 2022 with an unusual design - the zeropod concept, but the results weren’t as expected. And poor performance lasted until more recently, where now they’re in the hunt for at least a podium most weekends.

So, what caused this two-year blip, well, it all starts in their wind tunnel.

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[eedoamitay]

The average f1 fan is able to learn so much more than previous years, I absolutely love all of this information, super helpful in understanding the sport and enjoying it more

[theoriginalcraig]

A chief mechanic once said that MotoGP was 80% rider and 20% bike, while F1 is 80% car and 20% driver. Every year that goes by, I agree with that appraisal more and more.

[Bobby-hx]

‘Deliciously complicated’ is my new phrase of the week

[wnoyes]

So Ground Effect era significantly altered how critical the surface texture of the track is to performance. Restricted wind tunnel tests for Mercedes combined with a test “road” surface that was too smooth meant their testing failed to demonstrate real world performance. Consequently, Mercedes spent a long time in the dark as to why their cars were performing so badly compared to their own expectations.

[ant]

Not very glamorous but I used to clean the carpets now and again at the Red Bull wind tunnel site. The scale F1 cars were amazing, even under the bodywork everything was duplicated for working out cooling and fit under load.

[crunchyfrog]

I want to thank Willem for turning up and explaining this stuff to us. For years I used to read magazines like Autosport and wonder about how teams either moved forwards or back in performance, and study the differences between aero on the photos of races. It always fascinated me, but of course I was basically just trying to guess.
So I greatly appreciate this level of explanation. It truly puzzled me how Mercedes not just dropped the ball in their design but took so long to fix it. This explains an awful lot.

[misguidance__]

Fun fact: Particle Image Velocimetry is also called ‘Adrian Newey Vision’

[apc]

The 22 cars had so much more colour! Bring back fully painted cars through a weight allowance in the next regs

[chrisc]

Astonishing how long it took them to work things out, given how incredible the aero was on the W11

[aumpauskar]

Just on a completely different note, my boi Red Bull still rocking a World War wind tunnel

[juliusB]

TLDR: they probably used a smooth ground belt for more consistent and less wear dependant simulation data because of their limited number of tests but underestimated the ground boundary layer and it's effect on the ground effect car's caused by a rougher more realistic road surface.

[spybreak]

I don't watch every video you put out because my overall motorsports interests are a bit narrow, but whenever I watch one of your videos it's SUPER HIGH QUALITY, well produced, with obvious efforts and time and cost put into it. Great information, visuals, explained in a way that doesn't require expertise.
Fantastic channel, I appreciate all your efforts, this is better than most stuff on TV, much less YT.

[ChrisScully-oh]

As someone who works printing the wind tunnel model parts it’s great to see this kind of coverage for a part of the sport that is often forgotten about 👍🏻

[alikartal]

You got me at "deliciously complicated". Thanks, it was a great video.

[Model_Student]

3:56 seeing him standing inside the turning vanes was a genius shot to include. Loved that.

[Lucient]

More than 16 minutes into a 19 minute video, you finally describe the problem from the video title. You make very useful content but the title is misleading clickbait.

[tg_]

It's amazing how I keep getting to know how incredibly complex everything about F1 actually is even after all these years of learning so much about it.

[sebulbathx]

This is amazing. This is what I like about F1 the small details that have huge impact. It's hard to understand the level of detail needed to become champions.

[todortodorov]

What does this teach us: A good driver (like Lewis) only becomes champion if he is backed by the best engineers. If the engineers make a mistake, no matter "how great" that driver is, he cannot push that car to do miracles and win championships. In other words, Lewis was lucky to drive a Mercedes and not a Haas in the years when he won.

[NeumannKlaus]

So the ATR allocation did its job perfectly