Mercedes to reportedly bring W13 updates to F1 Australian GP

Mercedes are reportedly bringing their first major change to their W13 at the F1 Australian Grand Prix this weekend. The German team is likely to bring an all-new rear wing to the weekend, giving fans hope of a return to form.

The team has been plagued by porpoising problems since pre-season testing in Barcelona, unable to find the pace to match competitors like Red Bull and Ferrari. The German unit has gotten around the problem so far by increasing the ride height of the W13, killing the amount of downforce without much reduction in drag. The rear wing, as reported by formula1.com, is set to debut this weekend. It is expected to have a smaller section mainplane, resulting in lower downforce.

Although Albert Park is generally a higher downforce track than round 2's Jeddah Corniche Circuit, the new changes being made to the track are likely to help the team in their pursuit of challenging for the title. Mercedes have generally qualified 0.7 seconds off the pace in the first two races – a figure that will hopefully change for the German team.

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Removing porpoising is still Mercedes' number one priority

Mercedes claim that tackling the porpoising problem is still their number one priority moving forward into the 2022 season. The iconic team has failed to challenge Ferrari and Red Bull in 2022, leading to widespread worry from fans.

While the W13 has generally been very reliable in the new season, it still has a long way to go before it can pose a significant threat to the top two teams. Lewis Hamilton, however, did manage to score a podium in Bahrain's season opener, giving him and his team solid points.

As per the team's head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin, the team has not yet seen the true performance the W13 has to offer due to the setup changes engineers have been forced to make. He said:

“That’s [porpoising] probably priority number one. Because that’s ultimately preventing us from running the car where we’d like to run it for optimum performance. What we don’t know is, if we could just magically make that issue vanish, where would we actually be in terms of car pace: is the car fast enough or not? And it’s very difficult to answer that question.”

The F1 world is holding their breath and waiting to see if Mercedes can successfully tackle the porpoising problem and return to being the most dominant team in the turbo-hybrid era.