With Formula 1’s annual summer break finally here after half a season of battling it out on track, some teams are going into it with a clear picture of what they want to achieve before F1 is back racing. But Mercedes isn’t one of them because this season has been anything but straightforward for Lewis Hamilton & Co. so far. After starting the year on the back foot and revamping the W14 midway through the first half, Mercedes is going into the summer break with more unanswered questions than it would like. And Peter Windsor brought its biggest one to light.

After the past few race weekends where the Brackley squad seemed to have progressed toward catching Red Bull, the Belgian GP was nothing short of a regression in terms of understanding its car. While Hamilton’s P4 and George Russell‘s P6 might say otherwise, there are still blatant flaws that Mercedes needs to sort out, especially when conditions don’t favor the W14. And after working with Ferrari as its General Manager, Peter Windsor knew what he was talking about while discussing Hamilton and Mercedes’ future.

In his post-race analysis on YouTube, Windsor said, “Good luck to Lewis going into the summer break. Not sure Mercedes have any of the answers they really need in terms of what they’re going to be doing with the car.” Because of how up and down the car has performed this season, the team doesn’t have conclusive data regarding where the car is doing well and in what layouts it isn’t.

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He continued, “And is performance still on a full fuel load a big question mark as we saw in Hungary, and to some extent [in Belgium]?” After starting on pole in Hungary, Hamilton could only manage a P4, largely because of the W14’s shocking race pace. And with Sunday’s race in Belgium being the only full fuel load run of the weekend, Hamilton couldn’t keep up with the top three as much as he would’ve liked. Needless to say, Mercedes’ summer break plans are as big of an unknown to the team as it is to us. And to make matters worse, Hamilton gave Mercedes another reality check.

Lewis Hamilton is experiencing the ghosts of 2022

When the 2022 regulations were implemented, one of Mercedes’s most significant problems was porpoising. While it had gotten around to making Hamilton and Russel’s driving experience better, the remnants of it seemed to resurface at the Belgian GP. And it wasn’t just that. The rear end of the W14s was stiff and understeered throughout the race, and Hamilton pointed both those issues out after.

He said, “The back of our car was a big problem. We also suffered from the bounce, which we also had last year. We will work with the data we have and then see what we can do at the next race.” 

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Can Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes bounce (pun intended) back after the summer break once they figure out which direction to go in? Or will it be a repeat of the first half of the season?