Under-fire Mercedes Technical Director Mike Elliott, the man behind the team’s woeful W14, revealed developments for the new concept are already coming through.
Mercedes have finally given up on their slim sidepod design they debuted in 2022 on their treacherous W13, and strangely stuck with for this year’s W14.
But two races into the 2023 season, meant the team have finally accepted their radical approach is not working and as such a decision was taken to pursue a different philosophy as a heavily revised W14 is expected to break cover at Imola in May this year.
Speaking after the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix, where George Russell and Lewis Hamilton finished fourth and fifth respectively, Mike Elliott shed some light on the upcoming changes on the W14.
Quoted by Formula 1‘s official website and asked to explain what it means to change a car concept; Elliott said: “The simple answer is it means different things to different people.
“I think after Bahrain we had to accept we weren’t where we wanted to be,” he went on. “We had to look at all the things that make up our car and work out what could we be doing differently, how could we get more performance, because there is a significant gap for us to catch up to the front.
“So, the engineers are busy looking at aerodynamics, they are looking at the shape of the car, things like the sidepod geometry, the floor geometry – have we missed a trick?
Engineer are targeting the right things
“But we are also looking in the simulation world; are we targeting the right things, are we pushing the aerodynamics in the right direction, looking at the mechanical set-up of the car. Are there things there that we are missing? What else can we bring to the car that is going to add performance?”
With the season already approaching race three in Melbourne this weekend, Mercedes are pushing to deliver the upgrades as soon as possible.
Elliott added: “We try to do that as fast as we possibly can because we want to get back to the front, we want to be competing at the front, and the only way we are going to do that is by accepting we are not in the position we want to be and fighting and working really hard to get back there.
“Obviously, Bahrain was a real reality check and to find ourselves in the position we find ourselves in, not being competitive, was a real disappointment – a disappointment for the whole team,” he admitted.
“But you have to get yourself through that and you have to turn that into what [are we] going to do about it? How are we going to bring the sort of the energy and what we are capable of doing? How are we going to move ourselves forward? How are we going to get ourselves back in the fight?
“And actually, walking around the factory there is huge amount of energy, there is a huge amount of work going on,” the Mercedes engineer revealed.
“We are starting to see some of the development come through already that is going to get us back into this championship fight,” he concluded.