After the agonizing defeat in the drivers’ championship in 2021, Mercedes and Lewis Hamilton vowed to come back stronger in 2022. However, the advent of ground-effect regulations caught them off guard. The team struggled to win races for almost the entirety of the season. That run has continued in 2023. However, a veteran F1 journalist has made a damning revelation about an email that, if the Brackley-based team hadn’t ignored, they would have found themselves in a very different situation.

On the other side of the spectrum, Red Bull came up as the biggest beneficiary of the ground-effect regulations. While other teams, including Mercedes, spent almost the entire season coping with the porpoising issue, the engineers at Milton Keynes had no such issues. The only difficulty they had was with their car’s weight. That too, they overcame pretty quickly and got off to a flyer.

The crucial email that team Mercedes ignored

While almost every team struggled with the porpoising issue, Mercedes’ problems seemed amplified. Hamilton often complained of severe back pain, an issue Toto Wolff raised in front of the FIA. It would not have happened had the team’s technical director, James Allison, not ignored an email from a former FIA official.

Peter Windsor in one of his recent YouTube live streams revealed, “I still quote Peter Wright who was a brilliant, aerodynamicist, still is a brilliant aerodynamicist. And he said over the winter of 2021 to ‘22, he sent an email to James Allison saying, ‘good luck with the porpoising, James’. If Mercedes didn’t know about the porpoising, they weren’t reading their emails and he sent it to James and they presumably did nothing with it.”

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Resultantly, the Silver Arrows are now miles behind Red Bull in terms of pace. While porpoising does not seem to be an issue for them anymore, it has perhaps come at the cost of some straight-line speed.

Toto Wolff is confident of Mercedes’s resurgence despite the snub of Lewis Hamilton

After his P5 finish in the first race of the season in Bahrain, Hamilton came out, all guns blazing against his own team. He told that they ignored his feedback while developing this year’s car. Later, he took a swipe at them by telling the media that he was not a fan of driving “not great cars“. Team boss Toto Wolff, however, has refused to shift the goalpost.

In an interview from the last month with Motorsport.com, he said, “I don’t want to change the goals yet. I always want to think that we are here to fight for a world championship, even if it doesn’t seem realistic. We are only at the beginning, and I want to keep the team motivated to do the best possible job. There are many innovations in the pipeline. The layout of the car will change at Imola and we will see what this step entails.” [Translated using Google]

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Hamilton delivered the team’s first podium in Melbourne. The race in Azerbaijan, however, left Mercedes struggling for pace once again. Do you think they will bounce back as the circus now moves to the star-studded Miami fixture?