Andrew Shovlin: In 2024 we will have a completely different car

Next year’s Mercedes car will be significantly different from the W14, and the team plans to take victories again.

During the 2023 season, the car of the works team of the Stuttgart concern has already undergone significant changes, with a noticeable increase in speed, and at this stage of the championship Mercedes occupies second place in the Constructors’ Championship, although Ferrari is gradually catching up with it .

“Next year we plan to significantly redesign the car,” said Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ chief racing engineer. – But will we be able to solve all the problems related to manageability? This will depend on the effectiveness of some of our developments. These projects are already underway, but not yet completed, but we already have a fairly clear picture of the direction we need to go in to achieve improvements.”

The main reason why the Red Bull team has managed to achieve such impressive success this year is due to the fact that the RB19 chassis is not exceptionally efficient in any specific aspect, but at the same time all its characteristics as a whole are same level. very good level.

This car has good downforce, copes well with any type of bend, behaves stably at any speed and allows drivers to be economical with tires. The only stage of the championship in which Red Bull Racing performed worse than normal was the Singapore Grand Prix. Naturally, rivals are taking a closer look at the RB19, and someone is successfully copying certain solutions developed by the Milton Keynes team.

But Mercedes has set itself a more serious goal: in 2024 they will compete for victories.

“We will have a completely different car, but we are still at a fairly early stage in the development of the new chassis, so it is difficult to say whether we will be able to solve all the difficulties,” Shovlin continued. “But when we created our best cars in 2015 or 2019, for example, we didn’t know during the development process that they would be so great. We just worked hard, gave maximum effort and tried to reach as high speeds as possible.

In many cases, the performance of the chassis we developed did not reach the performance level we were aiming for, but we know that if you don’t set the most ambitious goals for yourself, it probably means you haven’t set the bar. high enough for yourself. But we will be able to understand a lot during the first few days of testing in Bahrain.”