11 April 2024 , 11:33
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Mercedes' lack of correlation between their simulation data and their performance on track is of "grave concern" to Martin Brundle.
The Silver Arrows have made an awful start to the new Formula 1 season. They have just 34 points to show for their efforts at the first four races and neither Lewis Hamilton nor George Russell has been anywhere near a podium.
Their fortunes didn't improve at last weekend's Japanese Grand Prix. Russell finished seventh and his team-mate was two places further back despite optimism after Friday practice.
So the W15 car is still no closer to the dominant Red Bull vehicle, despite Mercedes' change of concept. And team principal Toto Wolff has said that there is a lack of correlation between the data the team gets from the wind tunnel and what is actually happening out on track.
That is the most worrying part for Sky Sports F1 pundit Brundle, who fears for the team. "They've got to understand this car and I think that's a grave concern for all of the people there," he said.
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"There's a lot of very clever people, with a huge amount of resource, performance tools and budget. I'm not going to try and second guess what's wrong with it, or state what I think is wrong with it, because if they don't know, then I certainly don't know.
"They cannot get a handle on these ground-effect cars. This is the third season of these regulations. They turn up, they think they have aced it, a lot of positive noises, and then it still bounces a little bit with the porpoising.
"But their problem is, from time to time, the thing performs beautifully and they are really quite fast in phases. But, they can't seem to reproduce that session to session, let alone day to day, let alone Grand Prix to Grand Prix.
"This is the problem they have got - this knife edge of a car that sometimes looks like they have finally sorted it and more of the time they just can't understand it.
"When you've got that, when all of your tools and all your clever people don't correlate with the stopwatch and the performance of other cars on the track, and you can't seem to nail it down, then that's really frustrating and I would say very worrying."