Mercedes continues to hit the blind. The Germans have signed in this 2023 their worst start to the season in the last decade, with only one podium in the first five races and already being 128 points behind Red Bull. But the greatest damage has been done Aston Martin. In Brackley it has not gone down well for a client team to beat them with their same engine, and Toto Wolff wants a revolution in the W14.
The star team was going to introduce a new package of improvements at Imola, changing the flat bottom and the famous sidepods, which have been the hallmark of Mercedes for the last two years, but the suspension of the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix He threw the team’s plans to the ground.
Despite the fact that Monaco is not the most representative circuit to test the improvements, Mercedes will take this package to the Principality to premiere it at the next grand prix, since they need to shorten deadlines to be competitive and fight, at least, with Aston Martin in the part center of the season.
He has spoken about that revolution Pat Symonds. The one who was technical director of williams Between 2013 and 2016, he is one of the people who knows Toto Wolff best, since, as a Mercedes customer, he had a close relationship with the Austrian. Now, Symonds ensures that Wolff has the authority to carry out the revolution that Mercedes needs.
“Toto has been very clear”
“Toto has been very clear about the performance of Mercedes in 2022 and early 2023. He was always the first to praise the team during its successful years from 2014 to 2021 and therefore I had every right to question the direction that the technical team took with the design of the car of the new regulatory era that began in 2022″, has assured Pat Symonds in statements collected by ‘Motorsport.com’.
“Being the hands-on manager that he is, one can imagine that he will have been involved in some complicated and probably heated discussions at Brackley over the last year or so. He will no doubt have wanted to hear the results of the post-race technical analysis and also will have been informed of the content of periodic design reviews,” Symonds explained.
The British engineer believes that the first step to win again is to understand what is wrong with the W14: “Toto Wolff will have demanded explanations about why the team has lost the competitive advantage it held for many years and what steps have been taken to rectify the situation.”
However, this diagnosis is only the first phase, so winning again should take time for Mercedes: “The data can confirm that a car is slow in a medium-speed corner or that it lacks top speed, for example. , but solutions must be determined by an optimization process by the engineers.
“For example, a lack of speed can be interpreted as the car having too much aerodynamic drag, but to improve just that performance it is not enough to reduce drag, but rather to increase aerodynamic efficiency, a much more complex task.”
Flat bottom, new pontoons…
In the next two grands prix, all teams will introduce their first big upgrade pack. In Monaco, Mercedes will debut the flat bottom and the new sidepodswhile in Spain they will be Red Bull, Aston Martin and Ferrari those who update their single-seaters, so that, after the next two races, it will be possible to check if the revolution that Mercedes is going to carry out has the expected result.
