“They have the least performance impact,” Christian Horner bashes Mercedes’s major sidepod upgrade for the 2023 Monaco GP
Red Bull team principal Christian Horner gives his view on the newly updated Mercedes W14
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All eyes were on the Mercedes-AMG team this weekend as they were to bring major chassis updates to the Monaco Grand Prix. The mysterious nature of the whole scenario kept many impatient to see the new and improved Mercedes car finally. The Brackley-based team dropped their zero-pod concept and pursued a car with side-pods like the rest of the grid.
When asked about his thoughts regarding the W14, Christian Horner told the press on Friday that the ‘finer’ things rather than visuals have more of an impact in a car’s performance. “Well, to be honest, I haven’t had an in depth look at the upgrades,” he said. “Obviously, visually, they look a bit different. “But sometimes the visual things actually have the least performance impact. It’s what’s usually underneath the skin or the finer detail that has the biggest impact,” Horner further stated.
The 49-year-old also suggested that the enormous upgrades brought by Mercedes would make a significant hole in their budget cap. “So obviously they’ve bought a significant number of parts,” he stated, “so they’ve obviously committed a significant part of their budget cap to this upgrade, and it’s up to a team how and when it applies it,” He went on to say. A budget cap of $135 million was allotted to the teams this year. This, however, was perked due to the number of sprint races this season and inflation.
When asked about the competitiveness of their past rivals, he said, “It’s difficult to say. It’s more of a mechanical track here. We’ll know more in Barcelona about how to assess it.” Mercedes, like most of the other teams, planned to bring big updates to Imola. But extreme flooding in the area couldn’t let that happen.
The Impact of the side-pods on the W14 so far
Mercedes was fully committed to the zero-pod design all through last year. They were adamant that this design wasn’t due to their lack of pace. The Monaco Grand Prix had a different story to say. With Lewis Hamilton and George Russel finishing P3 and P15 in the first practice session of the weekend, Mercedes can be slightly optimistic about their performance. Free practice 2 ended with Russel being about 0.2s off Hamilton’s pace.
However, Mercedes trackside director Andrew Shovlin believes they could’ve done better if given a clean sheet. “We’re very much in the situation of looking at the car we’ve brought here and thinking ‘oh we’d have done that differently if we were doing it again, we would have done this differently’,” Shovlin said to Sky Sports.
Mercedes’ campaign so far hasn’t been outstanding overall, with only Lewis Hamilton clenching a podium in Australia. But the new side-pod design has many looking forward to their performance come Sunday.
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Justin P Joy
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