What next for Mercedes in its quest to get back to the top of F1?

Its cars may be a different colour in 2023, back to the inspiring black livery in which Lewis Hamilton powered to Formula 1 world title glory in 2020 and so nearly again in 2021, but there’s a clear sense of deja vu for Mercedes. This settled in, hard, at the Bahrain Grand Prix earlier this month. But the team has already decided to twist: the W14’s car ‘concept’, begun in the infamous W13, will be abandoned.  

That is despite the fact that Mercedes has finally been able to move on from the severe porpoising and ride bouncing it suffered across 2022. And the fact that last time out in the Saudi Arabian GP, it beat a Ferrari on merit in qualifying and defeated both red cars in the race, albeit with a little bit of safety car assistance. 

“I don’t think this package is going to be competitive eventually,” team boss Toto Wolff concluded after qualifying in Bahrain, astonishing the F1 paddock with his frankness and decisiveness after just one session in competition, on a track renowned as an outlier. “We gave it our best shot all over the winter, and now we just need to all regroup and sit down with the engineers, who are totally not dogmatic about anything.” 

So, that’s it, then. Soon, Mercedes’ striking ‘zeropod’ design will be confined to F1 folklore – remembered perhaps along with Tyrrell 025 X-wings, the McLaren MP4/10B mid-wing or Williams FW26 walrus nose as dazzling missteps. It’s that concept, and plenty of other design ideas, from the W13 of 2022 that led Mercedes to this point in time – one where it stands at the precipice of uncharted, dangerous territory for a squad that dominated F1 for nearly a decade.  

As with many teams at the start of F1’s new ground-effects era, Mercedes had to spend a huge amount of time and resources in fixing the porpoising and ride issues that were dominating the championship’s storylines this time last year. Back then, those were coming in the wake of what was still a thrilling battle of Red Bull versus Ferrari, Max Verstappen versus Charles Leclerc.  

The minutiae of how Mercedes found solutions became the central storyline of the team’s 2022 season, encompassing critical Barcelona and Austin upgrades, that sensational George Russell victory in Brazil, plus near-misses for Hamilton and his tenacity even with a struggling car. But Mercedes now feels that its progress in 2022 led it down, according to Russell, a “bit of a wrong path”.

That upward curve made Mercedes believe that the W13 and the zeropod arrangement could finally be converted into the rapid machine the initial 2021-22 simulations and wind-tunnel test results had suggested it should be. A winter of fettling and tweaking was required, getting rid of the inherent problems the team said were ‘baked in’ to last year’s design and had trapped potential and lap time. 

“We had the perfect storm last year,” Wolff explained. “The car got better and better, and then you start to question the concept of the car less than you probably should.” 

The 'zeropod' concept is one which Mercedes has admitted was the wrong approach

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar / Motorsport Images

Having done that, Mercedes launched the W14 at Silverstone on 15 February. There were rumours of a disrupted shakedown. But that wasn’t the reason for its deliberately cautious messaging on the year ahead, with Wolff admitting even in the team’s press material that Mercedes’ 2023 car would be “playing catch-up”, but could still “eventually be competitive enough to fight at the very front of the grid”. 

Ultimately, Mercedes was trying to avoid the situation in which it found itself in early 2022, when Hamilton boldly predicted that he’d reach new driving peaks in a bid to immediately wrest his crown back from Verstappen following the bitter disappointment of the Abu Dhabi officiating fiasco. But, based on subsequent statements, we can deduce that reservations regarding the W14’s potential as a W13 evolution had apparently already taken hold. 

“I knew that we weren’t in the right place when you saw the car for the first time,” Hamilton said ahead of the Jeddah event. “It looked still so much different to those of our competitors and it’s always nerve-racking in that moment…”

But, back ahead of Bahrain pre-season testing and the season opener on the same Sakhir layout, Mercedes pressed ahead with its plans for the W14 in its current guise. The test did not go brilliantly, with a hydraulic pump problem stopping Russell on the second of three days, and mid-corner handling issues also apparent. But the team’s progress on its car balance ahead of the race left Russell, at least, more confident. And for the Bahrain race weekend it switched to a low-downforce aerodynamic package and introduced a new, svelte rear wing – things it couldn’t do during the first part of 2022. 

“We really tried hard to make it work because the data that we have extrapolated showed us that this works. We were proven wrong” Toto Wolff

The rise of Mercedes engine customer Aston Martin had been obvious in testing, but the team still entered the initial competitive sessions of the new season reasonably confident, buoyed by the confirmation that porpoising and bouncing were “gone essentially”, according to Wolff, in testing. 

Wolff had explained at its launch that the W14 was likely to undergo something of a notable design change in the early phase of 2023. And after Bahrain testing the message from within Mercedes was the same – that come the Imola race in May, following the four-week gap between round three in Australia and the Baku/Miami double-header, a planned upgrade that would change at least some of the car’s upper aero surfaces was still on. 

Then came the stark “real reality check”, in the words of technical director Mike Elliott, of the rest of the Bahrain race weekend. After FP2, Mercedes insiders discovered they’d actually underestimated Aston’s potential as a frontrunning threat based on Fernando Alonso’s long-run pace being comparable with Verstappen’s. Then, in qualifying, Russell led Hamilton in sixth and seventh, the leading Briton 0.632 seconds off Verstappen’s pole-winning pace. That compares with Hamilton being 0.680s behind Leclerc in the same session a year earlier. On the surface, not a disaster, but clearly not where Mercedes expected to be. 

This turned out to be the central thrust of the decision to make massive changes to the W14’s design, and the basis for Wolff’s press conference appearance on that Saturday night that banished his launch comments about the car “eventually” being a winner. Mercedes had hit its design targets and done exactly what it had set out to achieve, but those aims were ultimately wrong. And following them to the next stages surely meant never catching Red Bull. 

Mercedes will now look to change its entire car concept

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

“We really tried hard to make it work because the data that we have extrapolated showed us that this works,” Wolff said subsequently in Saudi Arabia. “We were proven wrong. Very simply. You can see that the three quickest cars, including the Ferraris, have a similar concept of how they generate performance. That’s very different to ours. All of us involved in the decision-making process came to the conclusion that we can’t continue that way.” 

Two days after Hamilton and Russell had finished fifth and seventh respectively in the season opener, a crunch meeting with the drivers and the team’s senior management and engineering staff took place at its Brackley base. “Very good, honest, open conversations” were had, according to Russell. It evokes memories of Hamilton revealing that there had been “constructive arguments” regarding the W13’s weaknesses at a similar point in 2022. But the outcome this time was decidedly different – Mercedes will now fundamentally change its car concept and, surely, set off down the path pioneered by Red Bull and already copied by several other teams. 

“A lot of the questions were answered as to how we got ourselves in this position in the first place,” Russell added. “Plus, ‘What are we going to do in the short term, and medium term, to get out of it? What path do we want to be on?’ Those changes are already in place, getting on the track that we believe is going to bring us back to victory.” 

What Mercedes currently has in the W14 is a still-draggy package that is also missing ultimate downforce. It can’t compete with Red Bull on the straights, and in trying to do so produces sliding in the corners that robs its drivers of confidence and, particularly in Bahrain, then eats through their tyres.  

Hamilton is now openly saying that he’s struggling with getting the most from the W14. It hurts the seven-time world champion most when pushing flat-out in qualifying, which perhaps at least partly explains why he currently trails Russell 2-0 in their qualifying head-to-head. While Hamilton, inevitably, isn’t going into details just yet, he’s suggested the problem mostly concerns that unstable rear handling. 

Throughout his F1 career, Hamilton has struggled with braking instability – it steals confidence and in turn speed when trying to get back on the gas quickly. This was a particular issue with the W13’s season-long bucking last year, but Hamilton’s current problem is thought to be more concerned with how Mercedes’ new rear suspension design works with its critical downforce-producing parts on the floor and diffuser.  

This whole area is where Red Bull’s RB19, as the RB18 did, works extremely well, generally staying very stable through all corner types and elevation changes. This means its already high level of downforce stays packed on, boosting Verstappen and Sergio Perez further still.  

“We’re a long way down on downforce,” Hamilton stated in Jeddah. “So, we’ve got to pick up the rear end downforce particularly. The more rear we gain, the more stable the rear becomes, and the more confident I’ll be able to attack. 

Hamilton believes the W14 needs more downforce in general

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“But I think in general, just this car, even if we do change that, there’s a specific thing with something on the car that I have never had before. It’s a position I’ve not had in previous years’ cars. For me it’s the thing that is making me uncomfortable. I’ve just got to work hard to make sure it is changed.” 

Exactly how the W14’s major redesign plays out will now be the story of Mercedes’ 2023. But exactly what is going to be changed first, and how fast, is still the source of much intrigue. At Mercedes in particular, because of its current very different sidepod design, talk of a concept change “means different things to different people”, says Elliott. 

Whenever the term was mentioned to Mercedes’ engineers in 2022, they would typically reply that what made the real difference on F1’s new ground-effects machines were the underfloor venturi tunnels, the floor edges and fences, and how all that works with diffusers and suspension parts.  

To most F1 observers, sidepod design is what comes to mind first given it’s a very visible upper aero surface, and because those initially employed by Red Bull, Ferrari and Mercedes in particular all looked very different to each other. But although they are of secondary importance to performance on a ground-effects car, they remain critical parts of the overall design. 

What Mercedes does in the longer term is of utmost importance for the team itself and everyone else watching

This all matters because before the decision was taken to completely rewrite the W14 concept, Mercedes had targeted that sidepod change for May’s visit to Imola. Logically, that will now take on even greater potential importance and surely be of wider scope.  

“The engineers are busy, looking at aerodynamics; they are looking at the shape of the car, things like the sidepod geometry, the floor geometry, ‘have we missed a trick?’” Elliott explained after Jeddah. “But we are also looking in the simulation world: ‘Are we targeting the right things? Are we pushing the aerodynamics in the right direction?’ 

“We’re looking at the mechanical set-up of the car: ‘Are there things there that we are missing? What else can we bring to the car that is going to add performance?’ And we’re trying to do that as fast as we possibly can, because we want to get back to the front.” 

But, of course, there are other factors at play for Mercedes, particularly F1’s cost cap restrictions. The base $135million spending limit means the team cannot just produce an entirely new W14B. Even with major upgrades sprinkled throughout the year, which are now set to be very different to what the team had initially planned, certain parts will have to remain the same until the W15 appears in 2024. 

Aston Martin has moved ahead of Mercedes in the pecking order so far in F1 2023

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Motorsport Images

In the short term, Mercedes is faced with a choice of either abandoning its Imola upgrade to pursue something more substantial on a new car concept path later, or bringing it anyway to evaluate the data it will produce. Given Wolff has said that his team is now deciding “which direction we are going in and put all the resources behind it”, it would make sense to assume that the evolution updates for the initial W14 design would be dropped so the new concept can be more fully implemented in 2023. 

While that is going on, Mercedes can, declares Russell, unleash “performance in the locker in some races to come”. This means the team expects to make set-up adjustments around its existing design to gain performance, although obviously not enough to fully close the gap to the runaway Red Bull.

Mercedes was initially running the W14 too high as part of its post-porpoising adjustments, but it has since discovered that the 2023 rule tweaks regarding floor edges and diffuser throats meant this was unnecessary, and between Bahrain and Saudi Russell says its adjustments with this understanding found “more performance in a week than we found in almost a month”. 

But what Mercedes does in the longer term is of utmost importance for the team itself and everyone else watching. Will it, as Aston did at the 2022 Spanish GP, soon reveal a new, very Red Bull-like shape – the most visible features are the downwash sidepods most of the grid have adopted since Red Bull’s ground-effects package was established as the best – at a coming race? 

Elliott had said that the team’s initial Imola sidepod tweak would not “be the same as other people’s”. But now, Wolff is openly stating there would be “no shame” in the altered W14 being very similar in shape to the RB19. “It just needs to be the quickest possible race car,” the Austrian said in Jeddah. “And if that car looks like a Red Bull, or like SpaceX, I don’t care, it just needs to be quick. And if it’s a Red Bull, we will put a little bull sticker somewhere…” 

Whenever Mercedes does make its big design move, at Imola or elsewhere, the nature and scope of the changes will explain how it is going about its car concept overhaul. It will either be something so massive that Red Bull team chief Christian Horner and co will be quipping about a ‘black Red Bull’, or something smaller that suggests a bigger overhaul coming instead in 2024.  

Taking Aston’s rise up the pecking order as inspiration, an approach that combines both plans well could be very lucrative in F1 performance terms. Since the decision to abandon Mercedes’ initial new ground-effects concept, Wolff says his engineers have discovered “big steps in relative performance to where we are even now”, which the team feels has vindicated its choice for change. “There was no step back,” Wolff claimed. “On the contrary, there was immediately two steps forward.” 

Hamilton criticised Mercedes by suggesting the team didn't listen to his suggestions

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Putting those research findings into practical lap time gain is Mercedes’ next test – one aided by the upcoming calendar gap. But there’s an even bigger trial for the Black Arrows already going on, one that it has not faced ever since it vaulted to the top of the F1 tree at the start of the turbo hybrid era. And that is how it’s much-vaunted close team culture will survive a second year racing in the F1 doldrums, which, based on how long it took Aston to leap up the order once it opted to mirror Red Bull’s design concept early in 2022, could well be approaching. 

This is already showing signs of strain – from paddock speculation over Elliott’s position, to the recent Drive to Survive scene in which Wolff accosted his fellow team bosses over porpoising at the 2022 Canadian GP. That was a show for the cameras, sure, but also a sign of the pressure he has been facing for some time to recover Mercedes’ position as F1’s dominant force, with the might of its huge corporate backing looming large and expecting the results to which it had become accustomed. 

Hamilton also may have rowed back on comments he made to BBC Radio that Mercedes apparently “didn’t listen” to his comments on car design in 2022 when it came to the birth of the W14 – “It wasn’t necessarily the best choice of words,” he said in Jeddah – but that was also a rare sign of dissent in the Mercedes camp. This now includes former Red Bull HR director and COO Jayne Poole, who is working with Wolff as a senior advisor to conduct a review of the team to ensure that it is operating at its best. 

“I don’t want to lose more time. My colleagues don’t want to as well” Toto Wolff

McLaren’s decision to fire its former technical director James Key demonstrates what a team can do in the face of continued failure. But, unlike Ferrari, Mercedes has forged a reputation for not making such moves. That was when it was winning. And let’s not forget, Hamilton’s next contract remains unsigned, and those negotiations overhang everything currently going on at the team. 

Mercedes simply must get its next moves right if it is to arrest its slide down the F1 grid and return to the dominant position Red Bull now occupies. If it doesn’t, perhaps for the third season in succession, the second 2024 race will be followed by an Autosport magazine feature asking what has gone wrong…

Finally, everything it must do, it must do fast. “I don’t want to lose more time,” Wolff concluded in Jeddah. “My colleagues don’t want to as well.”

How long will it take Mercedes to get back on par again with Red Bull again?

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images