F1 News: Mercedes W15 Shows Positive Signs After Tackling "Rear End" Woes

Mercedes technical director James Allison revealed that the team has smoothed over all the rough edges on the new car on the handling and performance front.

Mercedes technical director James Allison said that the team has been working hard on its 2024 title contender, the W15 F1 car, over the winter break to tackle its handling and performance issues, particularly pertaining to the rear end of the car 

While it is a step in the right direction, Allison is sceptical whether Lewis Hamilton and George Russell will be able to fight Red Bull this season, since it is unclear how much of a development has been done by the Milton Keynes outfit.

Considering the positive results the team observed on the simulator, Allison was asked about the team's confidence level to which, he told Motorsport.com:

“It's impossible at this time of year to be anything other than apprehensive, coupled with excited, coupled with frightened. 

“Those are always the emotions that you feel, and I would imagine that even in Red Bull, after a year of such good performance, they will not be sleeping easy in their beds either because no one knows what everyone else will deliver.

“However, what we do have some hope for is that some of the more spiteful characteristics of the rear end of our car will be a bit more friendly to us, and the handling of the car a happier thing.

“That's all in simulation, but nevertheless we’ve got reasonable grounds to believe that we've made some gain there.” 

However, he thinks it is too early to judge the extent of success the team will achieve this year as the grid is getting closer by the year. He added:

“We hope we've done a good job with the new car, and we hope we've addressed some of the shortcomings that were so publicly on display with it last year.

“There is also just a little bit that nestles in the back of our heads, which is that the rules themselves have a much more sort of clear upper bound to them in the amount of lap time these cars are capable of producing.

“It’s a much more clear upper bound to them than the older generation of cars, which the more love you gave them and the more labour you put into them, the faster they got, seemingly without end.

“I think if you look at last year you see from the start of the season to the end of the season, although Red Bull's dominance was near complete and they didn't look vulnerable even to the last race of the year, if you look at the bigger picture, this is a grid that is gradually compressing.”

Old W14 Problems Solved?

Speaking on the areas that demanded attention on the car apart from handling, Allison explained:

“On top of that [handling], you've got all the normal housekeeping type stuff of just making it lighter, making it more downforcy and hopefully getting a bit of uplift from the power unit side, with the calibration level tinkering that they're still capable of doing under these current rules.

“Whether it's enough, time will tell. But it's nevertheless going to be interesting because we saw some things we knew were problems. We have hypothesized what the reason for those problems were, and we fixed those reasons. It will be interesting to find out how accurate we've been with that diagnosis.” 

Mercedes Press Image