Areas where Mercedes needs to improve

Last year’s W13 was only underperforming by Mercedes standards and compared to Red Bull and Ferrari cars. Nevertheless, the company’s factory team from Stuttgart took third place in the constructors’ championship, George Russell opened the scoring with victories and pole positions and Mercedes drivers climbed the podium 17 times in total.

In 2023, however, the team will need to improve significantly as it seriously intends to return to the top positions in the championship.

I remember the words of Lewis Hamilton saying he would not want to drive the W13 again, and clearly he had serious reasons for that. Mercedes has gone to great lengths to understand the reasons behind the miscalculations made in the development of last year’s car, and the UK edition of The Race highlighted a number of areas where the team certainly needs to improve.

The behavior of the car on the track

In the first quarter of last season, the team was among those most affected by high-speed pitching. Suffice it to recall the races in Monaco and Azerbaijan, where Lewis Hamilton and George Russell had serious problems precisely because of the design flaws in the W13 chassis.

Bodywork was more pronounced than rivals’ cars, due in part to the rigidity of the chassis as a whole. The ground clearance of the Mercedes had to be increased significantly, and on some circuits this particularly affected the car’s efficiency, as the suspension was in fact far from working optimally.

In addition, this led to a decrease in downforce and an increase in drag. If the designers and aerodynamicists of the Brackley team managed to take full account of last year’s lessons when developing the car in 2023, and the W14 will be devoid of the shortcomings of its predecessor, then it can be operated with minimal ground clearance, which should positively affect efficiency.

bottom stiffness

Chances are that Mercedes will stick to the previous concept and that the side pontoons of the W14 will remain emphatically narrow. Last year, the team’s specialists said more than once that the problems had nothing to do with this at all. However, Mercedes technical director Mike Elliott acknowledged the specific characteristic associated with the stiffness of the W13’s underbody.

“The difficulty we had with the narrow side pontoons was that the bottom of the car was big and bulged out on the sides, and it wasn’t easy to achieve the necessary rigidity,” he said in an interview last summer.

The bottom line is that the more clearly the edges of the bottom protrude from under the body, the more difficult it is to make it stiff enough. Since the ground effect is actively used in the new generation of equipment, a less rigid bottom may be one of the factors that cause buildup. But over the course of last season, Mercedes managed to sort it out, albeit at the cost of the car’s weight. That’s why it’s important to take a more balanced approach when developing W14.

Dragging

One of Mercedes’ biggest problems last year was the increased drag. Most likely this was due to the team having to operate the car with the wrong settings it was designed for, ie to cope with the build up I had to increase the ground clearance. The downforce level dropped, so I had to put a bigger rear wing on the car.

In theory, solving the root problems discussed above should allow the team to reduce drag to an optimal level.

The weight

As with most teams, Mercedes didn’t come close to the minimum allowed car weight last year, and it’s believed that every extra 10kg reduces lap results by around three-tenths. But last year at Brackley, the focus was on solving other problems, and they just couldn’t get the weight of the chassis down.

There is no doubt, however, that all this has been taken into account in the development of the W14 and that the new car will be lighter than last year, although it remains to be seen how far the team will be able to approach the minimum permitted limit. , because in 2023 it will have lost a few more kilos and is now equal to 796 kg.

brakes

“We’ve had a problem with the brakes all year round,” said Lewis Hamilton during the days of the US Grand Prix in Austin, explaining that braking power is unevenly distributed because the brakes heat up differently on different sides of the cars. This is probably not Mercedes’ biggest problem, but it is clear that the team also had to deal with it during the making of the W14.

engine

Mercedes power plants are no longer considered the most powerful and efficient in Formula 1, and this naturally does not suit the team, so the supervisors at the Brixworth base have a lot of concerns in the off-season.

Although the refinement of engines has been frozen since last year and it is forbidden to change their specifications, something can still be achieved by improving the software, as well as certain measures to improve reliability.

Overall chassis balance

Last year Mercedes drivers occasionally had problems warming up tires during qualifying, although that had a downside: on the Grand Prix distance, the W13 was quite economical with tires.

Mike Elliot suggested that the car’s performance in qualifying mode was affected by the quirks of the chassis concept as a whole, and at the same time he didn’t mean narrow pontoons at all. Therefore, the team is aware of this and while making W14 they try to make it more balanced overall.

At the same time, of course, one should try not to damage those features of the car that take priority on Sunday. According to Eliott, the team has a whole list of tasks to tackle over the winter, and this should help improve the car’s overall performance in both qualifying and racing.