NAIROBI, Kenya, Mar 10 – The Mercedes Formula 1 team is set to make “radical changes” to improve the performance of their troubled W14 car, according to Andrew Shovlin, the team’s track-side engineering director.
The team boss, Toto Wolff, had promised a revised sidepod design at the car’s launch last month to move away from the ‘size-zero’ design that was carried over from the previous year’s W13. However, after a disappointing performance in Bahrain, with Lewis Hamilton finishing fifth and George Russell seventh, Wolff suggested that the concept of the car was not working.
Shovlin confirmed that the team would have to look beyond changes to the sidepods. “People have tended to use the word concept when they mean the sidepod design,” Shovlin said in a Mercedes video. “Given the gap to the front, of course, we are going to look at bigger departures and more radical changes.”
“Those changes take time to turn into a faster solution in the wind tunnel; you can’t do them overnight. There is quite a lot of development that you’ve got to do around any sort of big change in geometry in that area,” he added.
The team is expected to make visible changes to the car over the next few races as they work on improving its performance.
Speaking about the lessons learned in Bahrain, Shovlin emphasized that the team had to do a lot of catching up, particularly on tyre management. “Ultimately, we’ve got a lot of work to do,” he said. “That gap in qualifying was quite large; we were over half a second to the front. In the race, that was even bigger.”
“That was compounded by the fact that when you get the tyre degradation, you get a bit more sliding, the tyres run hotter, and you end up finding it very difficult to keep them under any kind of control,” he added.
Shovlin acknowledged that there was a lot that the team needed to understand. “The key things are really getting on top of that long-run degradation, which last year was a strong point for us,” he said.
“Clearly, we’ve got something that’s not in the right place that we need to work on, but ultimately, the other thing is that performance gap to the front. The raw pace of the car is not good enough,” he added.
However, Shovlin also praised the team’s reaction to their disappointing start to the season. “I think seeing how well the team is working together,” he said. “It’s a very difficult start to the year, and after the season we had in 2022, we certainly didn’t wish for this sort of challenging start.”
“Everyone’s been very quick to acknowledge that problem. We know that we have a tough journey ahead of us, but we are committed to improving the car, to try and get it back to the front,” he added.
“The drivers are very much on board with that, and they have been working very well together to try and help us develop and improve the car,” he said.
“It’s nice just to see how everyone is very honest about the challenge that is ahead of us, very humble about where we are and what we need to do to move forward, and committed to finding solutions because we are not happy with our current performance,” he concluded.
