Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has revealed that his engineering group have told him that they aren’t “convinced” about Red Bull’s floor, following claims over how it’s a thing of “beauty”.
The Silver Arrows have had a chance to analyse Red Bull’s floor following Sergio Perez’s crash at the Monaco Grand Prix, which has turned out to be incredibly costly for the Milton Keynes-based team.
Perez crashed at the opening corner during Q1 at the Circuit de Monaco, with his car having been lifted high into the air by a crane in a bid to recover it.
Perez’s car being lifted into the sky allowed photographers to take several photos of the underside of the RB19, many of which Mercedes got a hold of.
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It’s given the Silver Arrows a chance to analyse Red Bull’s floor and to see if they can incorporate anything into their design, in the hope that it improves the W14’s performance.
Mercedes have discovered many “interesting things” from looking at the photos; however, there are parts which haven’t impressed the Brackley-based team.
“For me, if it’s complex or not, if it is fast, it is good,” Wolff explained to media including RacingNews365.
“That floor is certainly very fast. I asked the question [about the complexity of it] into my engineering group and they said there are interesting things they can analyse as part of the air-flow functions.
“But they weren’t convinced about the beauty, the aesthetics of the flow and just how it functions.”
Wolff went on to discuss the issues that Mercedes faced with their floor last season, which caused the horrific porpoising phenomena.
Bouncing is very much a thing of the past, thanks to the floor edges having been raised as per a tweak to the regulations for 2023.
Wolff revealed that at the moment there are no discussions about further regulation changes to the floor edges, with porpoising having become a “non-existent topic”.
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“There is no more talk about changing the regulations or raising the floor edges,” he added.
“The bouncing is a de facto non-existent topic anymore, when it happened in [Spanish GP Qualifying] we knew which direction we shouldn’t have gone. Now we can see performance and downforce.
“But the caveat is that you can get it very wrong with the targets, that’s why you see these massive swings between teammates and swings in performance.”