Mercedes still does not understand all the quirks of W13 F1 car

The German car manufacturer is coming off the back of a challenging 2022 campaign where it struggled to get as on top of the new-rules era as rivals Red Bull and Ferrari.

Its new W13 car struggled badly with porpoising early on and, despite some good progress over the year, still ended the campaign with a performance deficit to the front.

But while the team says the year has delivered valuable lessons in helping it understand how best to approach the new ground effect regulations, it is not pretending it fully understands all that went wrong this year.

Asked if the team got a total grip on the car, which means its W14 will have banished all the weaknesses, Mercedes chief strategist James Vowles said in the squad’s regular post-race videos: “I don’t think you can truly now, or even across the winter, state that we know everything about the W13.

“There have been some ups and downs, very much so, and that’s the part of what I meant by this car has items that we believe we understand and some of them that still not fully explained as a result of that.

“But if you look at the direction moving forward, the gaps to the front, especially on race pace, we made huge amounts of progress and you only do that by understanding where your problems are, working on them and working as a team.”

Mercedes looks set to shift the concept of its car for next season.

The W13 is believed to have suffered a lot because its peak performance could only be produced when running super low to the ground – which then exposed it to worse porpoising and bouncing.

The change of approach could pay dividends, but Mercedes is still mindful that there remained a big performance gap in Abu Dhabi last weekend between itself and Red Bull.

“The confidence we have is that we now have our tools, our wind tunnel tools, our development tools, our performance tools here in the organisation producing performance which is more than our competitors, and it’s allowing us to move further forward relative to them,” he said.

“There is still a void though and Abu Dhabi really showed that. That has to be caught up across the winter and I think we have a very good process and system in place to do that.

“That development that you saw across the season will continue across the winter and I think we will be in a very strong place next year.”

Vowles does think that the Mercedes team is ending the year stronger as an…