F1 News: Mercedes Confirms W15 Upgrade Plan For End Of Season

Saajan Jogia | Oct 23, 2024

Oct 18, 2024; Austin, Texas, USA; Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team driver Lewis Hamilton (44) of Team Great Britain drives during practice for the 2024 US Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas. Mandatory Credit: Jerome Miron-Imagn Images / Jerome Miron-Imagn Images

Mercedes' trackside engineering director, Andrew Shovlin, has confirmed that the development of the 2024 W15 F1 car has come to an end, with no more upgrades planned following the major package introduced at the United States Grand Prix.

The W15 has been a game-changer for Mercedes this season, marking the end of the team's winless streak that began in 2022. The challenges of the ground effect era, which started that same year, appeared insurmountable until now. However, Mercedes seems to have cracked the code for extracting more performance from the current generation of cars with the W15. Both Lewis Hamilton and George Russell secured victories this season, even managing to challenge the dominant Red Bull on multiple occasions.

While the USGP saw Mercedes struggle with the new upgrades as Hamilton and Russell spun out on the same spot on different days of the weekend, Shovlin revealed that the car is at the end of its development route, and thus, there is nothing more left to add to the car this season. He told the media at the Circuit of the Americas (COTA):

“We’ve brought pretty much everything we’re going to bring to the end of the year now.

“That’s not to say that in amongst the learning that you get across the races, we won’t be making further changes, but there are no major updates planned for us from here on in.”

Apart from rear cooling exits, upper wishbones, sidepod inlet, and an enhanced front wing flap, Mercedes also introduced a new floor to replace the one brought in at Spa-Francorchamps. Shovlin added:

“This is a new floor – we rolled back on the update, the Spa one, for the last two races.

“Partly [because], once you get into the long haul freight covering two different specs, it gets very expensive because you’re flying floors in enormous boxes.

“So the reason that we sort of made a decision and stuck with it was largely down to freight costs more than anything else.”

He added:

“It’s not a fundamentally different concept. It’s an evolution of that floor from Spa. It’s not the only change on the car. Hopefully, it’ll be a big enough step that the performance will be obvious.

“But we’ll see, learn what we can about it.”

Shovlin was then asked if the new floor was a damage correction step to the previous floor. He said:

“No, because, in the wind tunnel, they’ve just been continuing down and down a development path.

“With the requirements of the different circuits, there are underlying characteristics of our car that are hurting us on some of those street tracks like Baku and Singapore, where you’ve got those 90-degree corners.

“We struggle a bit, particularly in the race, with those type of corners. A lot of that is our challenge. It’s not really down to what we’ve been doing in the wind tunnel development but, for the areadynamicists, they’ve just been continually working, and the packages are just set at a defined point in time where you commit it to carbon.

“But, from their point of view, the things changing every single day.” [sic]