F1 News: Lewis Hamilton To Test Mercedes W15 As He Urges Team To Follow His Feedback

Lewis Hamilton will witness the 2024 W15 in the wind tunnel.

Lewis Hamilton will be visiting the Mercedes headquarters in Brackley this week to have a look at the 2024 W15 car in the wind tunnel, and also to see if the engineers and designers have implemented his feedback on the car.

Hamilton was slower by almost a second than race leader Max Verstappen in the Japanese GP qualifying. The British driver has repeatedly complained about the challenges he faced with the W13 car in 2022 and this year's W14. 

He has been quite open about his opinion that Mercedes pursued the wrong design direction with their car this year, which was on the lines of the W13. Both designs have vast differences with Red Bull's RB19. 

Expressing his struggles from Saturday's qualifying, Hamilton told the BBC on Saturday:

"It didn't feel that shocking today.

"It was just unfortunately slow. I just have a huge lack of rear downforce so you are fighting the rear on a knife edge, you are right on the limit, and that means your [tyre] temperatures are going up and you're losing grip through thermal deg [degradation] through the lap.

"An easy one second ahead of us for him [Verstappen]. I've had cars like that before and I know what it feels like and it's pretty special when you drive a lap with a car with that sort of balance around here. So I am pushing and hoping for my team to build me that for next year."

The root cause of the problem with the car is clear to the seven-time world champion but he seems to think that the Mercedes design team isn't taking him seriously. He added:

"I know what the problem is; it's just getting the guys to make the changes. I try to argue my point but it is not my job to design the car.

"I am hopeful they do the job but it is going to take real changes real quick."

According to Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes is taking the feedback from the drivers very seriously and is not clinging to the old concept they had before. He revealed:

"Lewis and George [Russell] together are always giving us feedback on where the weaknesses are, and while they might be identifying different causes we know fundamentally their car doesn't have enough stability.

"We know they don't have the confidence to throw it into a high-speed corner here and know that the rear's not going to slide more than they want and be a bit of a challenge.

"So you can build a clear picture of where you need to develop and we are certainly not clinging on to any concepts we had before.

"We are very open-minded and we have had a very chastening couple of years, and we are a team working very hard to try to get back to the front."

Mercedes AMG F1 Media