How did Mercedes get the new ground effect regulations so wrong? F1 pundit explains

F1 pundit Mark Hughes recently shed light on how Mercedes' zero sidepod and a unique ground effect concept cost them dearly in the 2022 and 2023 F1 seasons. The Silver Arrows are currently struggling quite a lot and are trying to take a new route in terms of aerodynamic concepts and bounce back to the top spots in Formula 1.

Speaking on The Race F1 podcast, Hughes started explaining how the Brackley-based team came up with a completely different ground effect concept, which was quite different from Red Bull and Ferrari.

"Mercedes devised a totally different way of configuring its car under the new ground effect regulations of last year, different to what became the classical Red Bull way, which has become almost standardized with only Ferrari and Mercedes, the outliers now all be in different ways," Hughes said.

Mercedes tried to completely drop the sidepods to create a larger exposed floor to increase downforce. However, the question was whether the downforce was high enough to compensate for the lack of airflow in the accelerating channel they removed from the sides.

"Instead of using a big undercut in the side parts to accelerate the air down the sides of the body, sealing the floor along the way, was to forget about the undercut," Hughes said. "So Mercedes, with its W13 of last year, decided it could more than compensate for the absence of that channel formed by the undercut by using the less bulky side pods to create a greater area of exposed floor."

"Now the underflow downforce is created by the pressure difference between the upper body work and the underflow, high pressure on top, low pressure beneath effectively sucking the car to the ground," he added. "So the greater area of an exposed floor, the greater area that pressure difference is working over and the greater, therefore, the downforce."

Though Mercedes believed that their side impact bar was the widest due to the widest part of the car, which was the exposed floor, this resulted in them moving the cockpit forward, which was later pointed out and criticized by Lewis Hamilton.

"To get the side impact bar and the widest part of the tub to align the full advantage, it did involve moving the cockpit forward a little bit," Hughes explained.

---

George Russell admits new Mercedes upgrades won't catapult them to the top

Though George Russell is positive about the new upgrades that were about to be introduced in Imola, he admitted that they won't help them bounce back to the top and drastically close the gap to Red Bull. He told Motorsport.com:

"Imola is a new weekend. We'll have some new bits on the car. Hopefully, that's positive. It's not going to change the world for us in the short term, butm hopefully, it's a step in the right direction."

Of course, since the 2023 F1 Emilia Romagna GP has been cancelled due to adverse weather conditions, these upgrades come be seen in the next races in Monaco or Barcelona.