Lewis Hamilton wrote off his chances of winning this year's World Championship after a dispiriting performance by his Mercedes team in the sprint race at the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix. The seven-time champion finished 14th, losing one place from his qualifying position, while team-mate George Russell was 11th, fighting back to where he started after he, too, lost ground at the start.
The 2022 season was already looking difficult for Mercedes after the first three races in which they were nearly a second off the pace of the leading Ferrari and Red Bull cars. But Imola, as team principal Toto Wolff admitted, "marks the low" of the year so far. "We stick together," Hamilton said. "We try to motivate everyone. This is the situation we are faced with.
"We are obviously not fighting for the championship. But we are fighting to understand the car and improve and progress through the year. That's all we can hope for right now." There may still be 20 races to go, but Hamilton said he had to be "realistic" about Mercedes' position.
In a sense Mercedes and Hamilton are waiting for Godot. A situation where they are waiting for something to happen, but it probably never will.
The concern for Mercedes right now is that while they know what is wrong with the car - too much drag, not enough grip and terrible aerodynamic bouncing on the straights - they don't know how to fix it.
"We have a direction to unlock the potential in the car to bring us much closer but at the moment we haven't got the key," Wolff said. "So we just need to grind away and rely on the science and physics before spiralling into some kind of negative momentum, which we are not."
Wolff sounded like talking about cracking a password to unlock the car's potentials. a Hacker could apply a method of brute-force attack by submitting many passwords or passphrases with the hope of eventually guessing correctly. The attacker systematically checks all possible passwords and passphrases until the correct one is found.
Brute force method certainly would take time. Password with 10 characters long has 1,188,137,600,000 combinations. It takes 23.05 hours or 0.96 days to crack your password on computer that trys 25,769,803,776 passwords per hour.
Certainly the Mercedes team would be too smarter to just pick a brute force methodology to solve their problems. The question would be the remaining races of the season. Would they have enough time and resources to crack the puzzle?
Mercedes have dominated the constructors' championship in the turbo hybrid era and secured an unprecedented eighth consecutive title in 2021. But this season's regulation changes have not worked in their favour, with both cars experiencing serious 'porpoising', a phenomenon caused by an increase - then a sudden decrease - of downforce.
Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff apologised to Hamilton on team radio at the end of the race. Wolff described their car as "undriveable". Obviously there is so much a driver could do with his car but even the seven-time world champion could not do magic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brute-force_attack
https://www.bbc.com/sport/formula1/61202423
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