F1 fans’ eyes were drawn to onboards of Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes W11 on Day 2 of 2020 pre-season testing at Barcelona, as footage appeared to show him moving his steering wheel in the car to effect a change in the W11’s attitude. Mark Hughes analyses what’s going on inside the new Silver Arrows machine…

Mercedes created a stir on the second day of testing as an on-board camera showed Lewis Hamilton pushing and pulling on the steering column (as shown in the video above), using a mechanism that appeared to change the alignment of the front wheels.

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Hamilton would pull the wheel back on the column as he drove down the straight (which had the effect of straightening-out the usual ‘toe-out’ of the wheels) and would then push it back down just before the corner, at which point the wheels would adopt their conventional ‘toe-out’ setting.

Typically an F1 car will be set up so that its front wheels are aligned with ‘toe-out’, which simply means that they splay out at the bottom away from the centre of the car, with the top pointing inwards.

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