Mercedes makes a shocking revelation about their 2023 car following a string of poor performances
Mercedes has gotten to know about the limitations of their car’s design even before the first race took place.
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Mercedes F1 trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin
Mercedes has been the most dominant team in the turbo hybrid era having bagged seven back to back constructors titles. With a substantial amount of success, their performance in recent years has been very baffling. With the new regulations coming to play, it had been tough on the Brackley based squad. With the budget cap being introduced, the team’s plan to improve had been going at a slow pace.
Having introduced their zero sidepod design in 2022 for the start of the season, fans were left disappointed. Even after many attempts, the team wasn’t able to improve their pace based around this radical design. With the 2023 season having started already, Red Bull have become a really popular opponent. They are clearly dominating the sport.
However, Mercedes knew something that others did not. Trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin stated that the team reached to a conclusion about the limitations of the 2023 car. This was way before the season opening Bahrain gp, the team got to know how bad their design was. With the team’s radical design, it was clear that something needed to be changed.
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In an interview, here is what he had to say. “You can look at your development rates in the wind tunnel, and before we even got to Bahrain, there were conversations about looking at bigger [concept] departures,” explained Shovlin. “That’s not looking at it in isolation for this year’s car development, it’s something we’ve done over the course of the last 10 years,” he continued.
“If you’re not finding the gains you need, you make a bigger change. You explore another area and often you want to unlock that. “That had already happened before Bahrain. But perhaps the urgency to try and bring those bits to the track has gone up following the early,” he stated. Mercedes are in a dire state and it doesn’t seem like they will get better anytime soon.
After being the pioneers of the turbo hybrid era, if is a bit unsettling to see Mercedes being put in such a place. The Brackley based team have George Russell and Lewis Hamilton driving for them in 2023. While the results haven’t been very satisfactory, the team does seem to be motivated to push harder. The next few months will be very important for Toto Wolff and the whole team to improve.
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Varad Joshi
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