Mercedes are aiming to repeat the recovery feat they achieved last year by winning a race before the end of the season.
The team went into 2023 with high hopes after turning their uncompetitive W13 into a race-winner by the end of the 2022 season. George Russell scored the team’s only victory in the penultimate round of the championship in Brazil.
However Mercedes slipped back again at the start of 2023 and decided on a new development direction for its W14 chassis. A major upgrade was introduced at the Monaco Grand Prix, and since then the team’s performance has improved.
“It’s really nice to be now racing at least for podiums, being able to show what we’re capable of doing,” said Mercedes’ chief technical officer Mike Elliott in a video released by the team.
“Hopefully we can turn that into more upgrades, more performance over the races to come and hopefully start fighting for some victories by the end of the season.”
Elliott expects the W14 will be more at home at the two upcoming tracks on the calendar: The Red Bull Ring, which holds next week’s Austrian Grand Prix and sprint race, and Silverstone, where the British Grand Prix will take place a week later.
“I think where we’ve seen the car struggling is more the low-speed corners. So if we start looking at circuits that’ve got more medium and high-speed content, I think we’ll do better there.
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“So Silverstone would be a good example of that. Austria shouldn’t be too bad for us either, so let’s hope we go well in both of those.”
Lewis Hamilton completed the first lap of last week’s Canadian Grand Prix in second place but fell to third by the finish. He pitted during the Safety Car period and again later in the race, and Elliott said it’s unlikely the team would have done any better had they used a different strategy.
“A one-stop strategy was probably the right strategy for the circuit, but only in a normal race,” he said. “As it was, we had a fairly early Safety Car with George’s incident.
“That meant the two ways of doing a one-stop would have been to pit under the Safety Car and then run a very long stint on the hards, and I think we’d have seen far too much degradation for that and we would have been vulnerable to cars from behind later in the race.
“The other alternative would be to do what Ferrari did, which is to stay out under the Safety Car and then pit later in the race, so running a longer first. For Ferrari that worked out because they were stuck in a DRS train with slower cars in front of them and they were able to jump them and then use their inherent pace in the race.
“For us, if we’d have stayed out, I think we’d have just been vulnerable to the cars around us and we wouldn’t have ended up in a better place overall.”
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