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ESPN staff
Mercedes is confident it can fix the cooling issues it experienced at the Austrian Grand Prix and has revealed it was already working on a solution before it turned a wheel at the Red Bull Ring last weekend.
Mercedes’ ten-race consecutive winning streak came to an end on Sunday when its cars finished third and fifth at the Austrian Grand Prix. After victories at the first eight races of 2019, the Mercedes W10 looked uncharacteristically slow throughout practice and qualifying at the Red Bull Ring and dropped further off the pace in the race as both cars encountered cooling issues.
The high ambient temperatures of 35C combined with the relatively thin air at an altitude of 700 metres meant the problem was exacerbated on Sunday and both drivers had to run in lower engine modes as well as lifting and coasting for 400 metres of the 4.3km track. Head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin said the issue was a byproduct of the team looking to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the packaging of the car during its design phase.
“Fundamentally the car doesn’t have big enough radiators and that’s something that we were a bit optimistic with how much we could get out of the cooling system,” he told Mercedes’ Youtube channel. “It’s underdelivered to what we hoped we could achieve, and it’s meant that we are carrying this issue where in the very hot races we will be struggling to keep everything cool enough.
“Principally to keep the Power Unit cool enough that we don’t do any damage to it you can increase the amount of cooling you get out of the car by opening up the bodywork exits and in Austria it was 35 degrees, that actually put us at the upper end of what we could achieve just by opening the car up. So, we were on limit.
“When you get to that point you are really limited in your options. You can start to use lift and coast, which is where the drivers get towards the end of the straight and they back off the throttle. They then brake a bit later and you have a period where the car is just coasting into the corner, the engine is not doing work and you can lose a fair bit of temperature like that.
“But, as you saw in the race, we were having to ask our drivers to increase that to around 400 metres per lap and that is why they were so compromised on performance. You can also turn the engine down a bit, then it will generate less heat, but you’ve got less power and you are slower on the straights. So, it was definitely a significant limitation in Austria.”
The unusually hot temperatures in Austria caught Mercedes out, but it was aware of the issue prior to the race and had started work on a solution to combat the problem at future races this year. There was some hope among rival teams that Mercedes’ cooling issues could open up more opportunities to take points off the championship leaders, but Shovlin says the team is hoping to get on top of the problem as soon as possible.
“We have got a very good car and a car that can be competitive at almost all of the circuits. But, there’s a lot of work to do. We’ve got a lot of projects looking at this particular issue with the cooling, how we can improve that. And that work started well before the race weekend in Austria and there’s a lot of people here busy with that. And we will get on top of that and make progress.
“It all really goes down to the fundamental design of the car, where in the push for very, very tight packaging, we have ended up being undercooled overall.”