F1 News: Lewis Hamilton Keeps Pressure On Mercedes For Successful 2024

2023 was a winless season for Mercedes.

Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton revealed that team boss Toto Wolff and the personnel back in Brackley are under immense pressure to develop a car for the next year that can challenge Red Bull's title contender. 

The 2023 campaign for Mercedes was a winless one so all hopes are pinned on the revival of an all-new car concept for the W15 for 2024. Wolff recently revealed that almost all components from the present W14 car are being replaced for next year.

However, considering the pressure coming in from all sides, Wolff and the team have little room for error in a repeat attempt at making a ground-effect era car work. Hamilton revealed that everyone on the team was facing the heat ahead of a critical winter. When asked how much pressure the Mercedes team boss was under, he told Motorsport.com:

“A huge amount for sure. Not just Toto but globally, all of us. Everyone back at the factory, a huge amount of pressure on them. 

“Ultimately, as a boss like Toto, you have to start leaning on people more rather than backing off on them. And how you do that is not easy, as people break at a certain point.

“So how do you do it in a constructive way, in a way that’s inspiring them to continue?

“For me, hopefully some of the race results and drives that I’ve been able to put in, I like to think that sparks inspiration for the guys: like ‘oh we’re almost there’, and that trickles down through the whole system.”

Speaking of the lack of direction over the past two years, Hamilton added that the team didn't know which route to choose. He added:

“We didn't have a North Star necessarily at the beginning of the year, knowing exactly where we needed to work towards.

“And it's been kind of a zigzag line trying to frickin’ get to where we need to be. Every now and then something positive happens, you're like, 'Okay, that's it.' And then it shifts, so the goalpost is always moving, which is typical.”

However, with the return of technical director James Allison, the seven-time world champion revealed that the team knows what development direction to go for. He said:

“Yes, I do believe we have a North Star now, which I don't think we've had for two years.

“But still getting there is not a straight line.

“There were just certain things, decisions that have been made, that just left you blocked at the end of a road, and you can't do anything, because of the cost cap and all these different things.

“If you look at the Red Bull, and they've done an amazing job, but from Bahrain last year, they had a bouncing issue and fixed it that week. 

“It is like if you're trying to build a wall. It was one brick after the other: brick, brick, brick. Just development, development, development.

“Maybe they added something, and it didn't add performance, but they were still building.

“For us, we had to knock down the wall. We had a lot of aero on that first car last year, but we had to basically knock a ton of downforce off it and then slowly tried to add it. But every time we tried to add it, it was worse. We just didn't improve for a long, long, long time.

“So, you can imagine they [Red Bull] are progressing. And we're going like this [he indicated a near flat line] Then eventually, it's slowly coming up while they're continuing.

“That gap... We are just on massively different trajectories. But I think we understand the car so much better now. We have developed great tools in the background.

“So naturally, I'm hopeful. But I'm not going to hold my breath.”