F1 News
Mercedes announcing big changes: 'We remain open-minded'
- GPblog.com
Mercedes' team is still always in a slight state of crisis. The German racing stable, which seemed untouchable between 2014 and 2021, has not been a shadow of what it was since last year. According to its technical man, Andrew Shovlin, it is an opportunity for the team to jettison the concept of the car, he told Motorsport.com.
No fewer than eight years in a row, the Brackley-based men captured the constructors' title. By 2022, the party was over. After the new regulations, the team managed to win just one race. Fighting for the world title was only a dream. Still the Germans failed to catch up with world champion Red Bull. Indeed, Lewis Hamilton was over a second (!) slower than Max Verstappen during qualifying in Japan.
Earlier this season, in Monaco, the team presented an almost entirely new car. The old concept was abandoned. The W14 had sidepods again, a new floor and a new suspension. The car had more downforce and was more competitive, but further development now seems to have stalled somewhat. Mercedes is not shying away from possibly giving another concept a chance in 2024:"We're certainly not clinging on to any concepts that we have had before. We're very open-minded," Shovlin says.
New concept for the W15?
Mercedes will once again come up with a new car in 2024:"We are changing the car quite considerably for next year, but whether or not we can solve all the issues that we've got on the handling, that will depend on a number of projects delivering. [They] are underway and they're not complete. We've got some good directions to try and improve that."
Whether the new concept will be a step forward, the Briton dares not say. "The car will be different. We've made a lot of changes to it, but it's very early in the development of a new car to be able to say, we've got it sorted. When we launched our best cars in 2015 or 2019, those years, we didn't know that they were going to be great cars when we developed them."