Mercedes answered one burning question of the off-season when the team presented its new W14 on Wednesday: would the deposed champions discard the aggressive design concept which was the hallmark of its least successful car for 11 years?
The answer was a clear “no”. The dramatically narrow ‘zero’ sidepods familiar from last year’s car remained. Technical director Mike Elliott said the W14 featured “the DNA of the W13 but also a lot of evolution and detail improvement”.
Mercedes clearly still have faith in their core concept. The team consistently said towards the end of last year they did not believe their unique approach to sidepod design was the reason for the porpoising problems which blighted their campaign and, despite some improvements, persisted to the end of the season.
However, much as was the case in 2022, Mercedes is planning a revision to the car which appeared at launch. With only one pre-season test this year instead of two, that change isn’t due to come until after the first race.
“The sidepods will change, not very soon, but we’re looking at solutions,” Wolff told media including RaceFans. “But it’s not a core fundamental performance part, as we judge.”
“I think it’s important to be bold in this sport, and I’m still proud of the solutions that were put in the car last year,” he explained. “Our sidepod design is not something that we believe was fundamentally the reason why we didn’t perform.
“We’re looking, there is no holy cows in our concept. It’s not that we don’t want to follow anybody’s ideas. We kept staying with the narrow sidepod as it is, but you could well see some development from now on, that could be coming with the upgrades and the sidepods.”
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Mercedes’ bitter experience of 2022 led them to rethink their approach to development.
“Last year we learned a tough lesson,” said Wolff. “Because we knew that we are going to bring an upgrade package for test number two, that was worth a second-and-a-half, in a way you’re then looking at the first test and thinking ‘well, that’s not really relevant because that’s not going to be the car’.
“Then we put that on the track and it wasn’t performing at all as we expected. So this year we went the other the other way around.”
Having been misled by their expected performance of the W13, Mercedes’ priority is to verify its successor behaves as their simulations…
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