Mercedes technical director James Allison has confirmed the team is poring over images of the floor on Red Bull’s RB19 in the wake of Sergio Perez’s crash during qualifying for last weekend’s Monaco Grand Prix.
The situation is unsurprising given the component has been one of Red Bull’s best-kept secrets since the introduction of new aerodynamic regulations at the start of last season, and instrumental in its dominance of the ground-effect era.
What unfolded in Monaco was one of the major talking points as Lewis Hamilton’s crash in final practice saw the W14 hoisted high into the air, with images materialising of the underneath of the car.
That was unlucky for the team on a weekend in which it introduced a new floor as part of a major upgrade package in its bid to return to the front of the grid.
Fortunately for Mercedes, Perez’s incident during Q1 has since allowed it to at least redress the balance given the photos that emerged of the Red Bull floor.
Asked as to how much a team can learn from such images, Allison said: “Certainly it always attracts a lot of interest!
“There is a lot of scurrying around with team cameramen, not just to rely on the TV pictures which are low resolution and not good enough grade.
“Photographers are positioned at strategic parts of the track where there is a likelihood that the cranes will be brought into play and there they are clicking away furiously, and then our inbox is subsequently filled with high-resolution images of other cars.
“Sadly, our own car had its trip into the heavens and there will be plenty of photos in our competitor’s inboxes from that.
“But yes, we got a nice clutch of Red Bull imagery, and that’s always a good thing for our aerodynamicists to pore over and see if we can pick out details that will be of interest to us in our ongoing test programme.”
No alarm bells for Mercedes
That programme began in earnest in Monaco with updates that also included a new front suspension and sidepods.
Allison readily concedes that Monaco “is not the place you would like to bring a major upgrade to the track”, with this weekend’s Spanish GP set to offer a greater perspective on their performance.
Allison feels Mercedes has at least set off on the right foot, even if the W19 “didn’t set the world on fire in qualifying” in Monaco, although “the car had reasonably tidy race pace”.
“The drivers seemed to give reasonable feedback about the car, they felt good under braking, the car felt okay and the data that we took off the car on the aerodynamic sensors were not giving us any alarm bells,” said Allison.
“They were suggesting that things were in line with expectation.”
As to what can be expected in future races, including this weekend at the Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, Allison added: “We certainly will settle back and look at what the Monaco upgrade package has brought us at a more normal track, but we will also push on in parallel with a whole bunch of more things.
“There will be a little bit we are bringing to Barcelona and many more things in the races that follow. We can’t afford just to do everything sequentially, although there is a sort of academic purity to that, it’s just too slow a way of going ahead.
“The upgrades will keep coming, we hopefully have a decent package to build upon with what we put on the track in Monaco, and then we just step forward from here up to the summer break and beyond.”
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