The performance of the Mercedes of 2022 has nothing to do with that of 2021. The one of this season has not been able, far from it, to fight for the championship. Lewis Hamilton Yes, he could do it in the past, in which he lost the title to Max Verstappen on the last lap of the last race.
But what is it like to drive this year’s car? The seven-time Formula 1 champion has made a curious comparison: “I described it to my engineers: imagine that you are trying to sneak up on a horse…”
“Where is the line that, if you cross it, will give you a kick? And you know that when it hits you in the face it’s going to hurt”, comments the British pilot in the preview of the Mexican Grand Prix.
“That’s one of the best ways to describe how it is, when you’re trying to lean on the car and it goes away and it’s unrecoverable. The behavior of this car is random,” details Hamilton, who is still looking for that long-awaited victory in the present season. In Austin he was xerca, but Verstappen was once again unattainable in the final stretch.
Mercedes’ problems in the first races have prevented the team from fighting. The ‘porpoising’ was terrible: “Sometimes it’s hard to know how long it’s going to take to fix a problem like this. Also, I’ve never had a porpoise like this before. They didn’t expect it to take as long as it took to understand the cause of the bounce. They’ve had to create new tools and all those things that we didn’t have before.
“You cling to hope. But the next comes evolution and it doesn’t work, and the next one comes and it doesn’t work. Imagine the people who build those things and they’re seeing their performance in the wind tunnel, but they’re not seeing it on the track,” says the Briton.
He emphasizes that “they are still standing” and has hope for 2023: “What does not kill you makes you stronger, and we are still standing. It’s not going to be easy to change the car to make it one of the best for next year, but I think we understand much better why it is the way it is.”
