Mercedes admits they are not yet sure whether the new floor they introduced at the Belgian Grand Prix will work as intended.

The team’s cars finished seventh and eighth at Zandvoort, the first time they had used the new floor in a race. The drivers described the car’s handling as difficult and after the race Lewis Hamilton said they needed to check “whether our upgrade actually makes a difference or not.”

James Allison, Mercedes’ technical director, admitted that they “don’t yet know for sure” whether the underbody will deliver the desired performance.

“You can do some simple measurements and say the downforce it was supposed to deliver looked like it was there,” he said in a video released by the team. “So you could assume at some level that it was working as expected.”

“But the speed of the cars this year depends more on their handling. So it’s not just about whether your aerodynamic package gives you downforce, but does it give you the balanced car you need in the corners. Does it give you the balanced car you need from high to low speed?

“We definitely know that we didn’t have a well-balanced car this weekend and that’s what caused us to lose most of our speed. Whether that was due to the new floor, the new aero package or not, we need to keep an open mind and that’s something we need to revisit at future races.”

“So we now know that the downforce has been measured, but we are not sure if the balance is right. We will have to investigate this more closely over the course of the year.”

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Mercedes won three of the four rounds before running on the new floor, with Allison saying the team didn’t get the setup right at Zandvoort.

“It won’t be as simple as the track not suiting the car. Whether you have a good weekend or not depends on a lot of factors and they all have to be pretty much right to get what you call the true pace of the car.”

“Before the break, we managed to find our rhythm on practically every track. In Spa, we got a little off track, but were able to get it under control again just in time.

“This weekend in Zandvoort, with the weather on Friday and the decisions we made overnight, we just didn’t manage to get into the rhythm we needed to get the best out of the car. And small mistakes, small mistakes in setup can turn you from being really competitive into being pretty mediocre. It’s tight at the front and we didn’t get it right this weekend and that’s why we got a mediocre result.”

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Dutch Grand Prix 2024

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