Mercedes confident in new F1 floor gains - but hint at handling concerns

Mercedes have revealed that their recent F1 floor upgrade is “generating the load that we expect”, but hinted there could be some side effects in terms of how it’s affected the “handling characteristics”.

Mercedes introduced a new floor for the Belgian Grand Prix before the summer break.

Due to the poor weather conditions in practice, Mercedes abandoned running it at Spa before claiming the victory with Lewis Hamilton.

Mercedes decided to run with it at Zandvoort, but struggled for overall pace, as both drivers finished well adrift of Lando Norris.

Speaking on the latest video on the Mercedes YouTube channel, trackside engineering chief Andrew Shovlin confirmed the new floor is adding downforce to the car.

“Over the last three races, we’ve done various compares of the packages and principally comparing the floor, and what we are confident in is that it’s generating the load that we expect,” Shovlin said.

“How do we know that? We’re measuring the forces that it generates on the road through the suspension. We are also looking at the pressures that are generated across the car, and we can correlate that with what we’re seeing in the wind tunnel, and that allows us to get a pretty decent read on whether it’s doing what we expect.

“It’s important to note this was not a very large gain that we were expecting, it was quite a small package that we introduced, but we’re confident that it is generating that load.”

While the new floor is adding load to the car, one theme of these regulations has been how more downforce can upset the handling of a car.

Ferrari ran into this problem with their Spain upgrade as more “load” resulted in more bouncing in high-speed corners.

Shovlin conceded that this is a “more difficult question” that Mercedes need to answer.

"The more difficult question that we need to answer is: Is there anything subtle in the handling characteristics that this package might be doing that we haven’t anticipated?” he added.

“That’s quite difficult to assess, because the car will perform differently track-to-track, some tracks it’s been working very well. Other circuits we’ve struggled with the balance of the car regardless of the aerodynamic spec, and yes, the last two races haven’t been as good as some of the one’s that preceded it.

"It may well be that’s just the normal variation from track-to-track, but that’s what we’re going to be looking at over the next few days, and on top of that there are other updates that we’re bringing into the system.

“There’s quite a lot for us to consider, but we do have a lot of data now, and we can go off and use the next few days to learn what we can from that.”