Mercedes: New W14 sidepod design won’t copy F1 rivals

His comments suggest that while the team is planning to move away from the “size-zero” design introduced in Bahrain a year ago on the W13, it won’t necessarily be following the trend towards the concept used so successfully by Red Bull last year, and since copied by others.

Team boss Toto Wolff flagged an in-season sidepod change at the launch of the W14 last month when the new car was revealed with the size-zero design still in place.

"I think, for us, it's how we developed the car last year," said Elliott when asked about the decision to initially stick with the W13 concept.

"I think we've done a lot of work looking at other types of solutions. And we keep coming back to this one as being the one that favours us. Is that the right long-term solution? I guess we're going to find out.

"As it happens, as Toto already said, we've got different bodywork coming, it won't be the same as other people's, and it won't be the same as what we've got, but it'll be different."

Asked by Autosport about the timing of the change Elliot would not elaborate.

"It's just part of the normal development," he said. "We have got a different sidepod that's coming in, but it takes time to bring, it takes time to make the bits, it takes time to change the bits to go underneath the bodywork for it to fit. So we'll bring it as soon as we can."

George Russell, Mercedes F1 W14

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

Elliott insisted that the team is in a stronger position than last year, despite an apparent deficit in performance to its main rivals.

"If you look at where we were last year, we were really struggling with bouncing," he explained.

"I think over the winter, we've got on top of a lot of the issues we had in the car, and we've come here feeling like we've got a better package to work with.

"I think when you look at the three days of winter testing we've done, I don't think we feel we actually got the best out of the car yet.

"I think we had a fairly poor day on day two, but we're still learning. And I think we learned a lot between the test and coming here."

Asked about the feedback from Lewis Hamilton and George Russell, he said: "We've probably not quite got the balance window where we want it. The car is not quite the handling they want it to be yet. So that's our job to go and fix that."