Mercedes Plans Substantial Changes to 2024 F1 Car in Pursuit of Championship Success
After finishing as the third-best team last year and currently battling Ferrari for second place this season, Mercedes is gearing up for a major transformation in its Formula 1 challenger for 2024. The current W14 has seen conceptual changes leading to improved performance, but it still faces handling issues.
According to Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ director of trackside engineering, significant alterations are in store for the car next year, with ongoing projects aimed at addressing its weaknesses. The goal is to compete with Red Bull, known for its well-rounded performance rather than exceptional attributes in any one area.
Red Bull’s car excels in downforce, tire management, and handling various types of corners and speed ranges. Many teams are moving toward the RB19 concept, with some planning developments for next season.
Mercedes faces the challenge of translating its developments into race-winning and championship-contending performance for the 2024 season.”
“The car will be different, we’ve made a lot of changes to it, but it’s very early in the development of a new car to be able to say, we’ve got it sorted,” Shovlin said.
“When we launched our best cars, 2015, 2019, and those years, we didn’t know that they were going to be great cars when we develop them, you’re just working as hard as you can try to find as much performance as you can.”
“On a lot of those cars, we missed targets by quite a chunk in terms of performance but what we do know is if you don’t set very ambitious targets, you’re probably not setting them high enough.”
“But you learn a lot in the first couple of days of the Bahrain test.”
