F1 News: Mercedes Confirms W14 Design For 2023 Season With Porpoising Issue Fixed

Toto Wolff and Mike Elliott look ahead to 2023.

Mercedes technical director, Mike Elliott, has given an insight into the W14 car and the improvements that are being made for the 2023 season during a season review video.

The team struggled with many problems throughout the 2022 season and they will be working to make significant improvements for 2023. Elliott explained how the team is using last year to learn and progress, he said:

“The team's response, the way they've stuck together, tried to work things out and the progress we've made, are the parts I'm most pleased with. Of course, the start of the season has been really challenging but we know how good we are when the tough times come. Let's take a cue from what Niki [Lauda] said: you learn more from failure than from success."

One of the biggest changes on the W13 was the zero sidepods design. All of the aerodynamics of the sidepods were made much smaller and they made the cooling air intakes vertical. Team principal Toto Wolff added:

“We've been talking since October 2021 at the factory about how exciting it was to find the performance on these new cars through the floor. For us, the real trick was how low we could run the W13. Unfortunately we went in the wrong direction.”

Referring to the major porpoising problems at the start of the year, Elliott explained:

“2022 is the first season where we started with a problem we didn't anticipate. We thought the concept of the new cars paired very well with the low ground clearances. And what we were seeing in the gallery was huge gains by lowering the W13 further and further. In retrospect I can say that we pushed too much in that direction.”

The Spanish Grand Prix was the first race of the season that looked more positive for the team, although it ended up being a "false positive". Elliott continued: 

“In the first part of the season we gave up a large chunk of performance from wind tunnel work to try to massively reduce porpoising and I think what we saw in Barcelona was a car that we could finally drive the way we wanted, in terms of ground clearance .”

As the season went on, the team were able to rectify the issues with the porpoising and put themselves in a more competitive situation. Elliott went on to explain the position the team were in when it got to the Austin Grand Prix.

“We arrived in Austin with a car that didn't outperform Red Bull but at least put us in a reasonable position where we could say that our development had taken us in the right direction and given us some confidence. in what we are doing for the future.” 

Speaking at the end of the 2022 season, Wolff explained that the 2023 car will have different "DNA" from the W13. He said:

“The DNA of the 2023 car will be different from that of the current car, as we will change the architecture, but it doesn't necessarily mean that our chassis will look very different from that of the W13. “ 

The Mercedes W14 is anticipated to have the same zero sidepod design. The team brought the W14 to the Virtual Test Track as early as possible into the winter break to be able to see how well the changes work. 

It has now been reported, via Formu1a.uno, that the team are heading into 2023 "knowing how to generate it [porpoising], how to stop it and above all how to simulate it using the highly sophisticated tools present in the factory."