What will be the margin for improvement of the 2024 single-seaters compared to those of last year? The rumors in the paddock speak of around 5 tenths, an important leap for cars that are created with the same technical regulations and tires that do not change. The information comes from different teams, a sign that the objective may be achievable, taking into account that the cars will evolve towards the convergence of the most high-performance solutions.
The era of experiments seems definitively over, the trend is to develop concepts that allow us to take ideas that have given important results to the extreme. Mercedes abjured F1 without bellies, having to dismiss the technical director, Mike Elliott, an obstinate supporter of a concept too extreme to work on all the circuits of the world championship, and had to recall James Allison to the command deck who had to re-motivate a work group that is emerging from two lean years after a record sequence of successes.
The W15 will represent a break with what Stella offered in the first two years of ground effect single-seaters. In Brackley they will have to demonstrate that they know how to create a car that, at the very least, will be able to stay ahead of those of the customer teams: in the first half of the championship it was the Aston Martin AMR23 that preceded the black arrows, while in the second part of the season it was the McLaren MCL60 to have stuck its nose out in terms of pure performance.
In short, with the same engine built in Brixworth, two teams out of three customers (Williams has fewer resources to enter the competition) competed with the official team. In 2024, Mercedes wants to regain its rightful role, even if the Constructors' World Championship ranking has established that it was the Star that was the closest Constructor to the elusive Red Bull.
Photo by: Giorgio Piola
Mercedes W14: The highlights of a bad car that adopted bellies from the Monaco GP
But what is scary are the 451 points that Mercedes must recover from the Milton Keynes team which closed last year's 22 GPs with a score of 860 points, which is the absolute record in the history of F1.
The question that Allison asks is only one: what will be the margin for growth of Adrian Newey's creature? If the English genius is able to evolve his RB20 like his opponents, Red Bull will still be impregnable. Christian Horner predicts a tighter 2024, taking it for granted that we will not see a repeat of the 21 victories of 2023 (19 by Max Verstappen and 2 by Sergio Perez), but the ambition is to seal the world poker with the Dutch driver.
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Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes F1 W14
In Brackley there is optimism in the hope of reducing the gap from Red Bull: in the meantime the W15 will have no design link with the disappointing W13 and W14. Allison has put things back in order: the cockpit will go further back and Lewis Hamilton will no longer have the sensation of driving off the front wheels. The Stella technicians, in fact, decided to shorten the transmission box which was the longest on the grid, to propose a layout more suited to current ground effect cars.
Elliott had bet on a long rear end to have a diffuser with greater surface area capable of generating more aerodynamic load with the car body, thinking of being able to use wings with a lower incidence. Mercedes, on the other hand, suffered a greater sensitivity to porpoising compared to other single-seaters and the lack of side panels, at least in the first version of the W14, had made the surface too sensitive to the turbulence of the wake of the front wheel, disturbing the efficiency of the pavement in the low pressure area.
Adrian Newey had discovered in 1994 on Ayrton Senna's Williams FW16 that overly long bellies could cause the floor to stall in a car that had returned to passive suspension, whereas it had been designed for active ones. The Englishman had noticed that at certain speeds it produced a strong bouncing with sudden load losses which had been limited by adopting a shorter bottom and sides. The changes came after the death of “Magic” in Imola due to a broken steering column, but Adrian at Red Bull certainly took advantage of the experience gained at Didcot.
Photo by: Giorgio Piola
The rear end of the Mercedes W14 will be completely revised on the W15
The new Mercedes, therefore, will have the advantage of redistributing the masses and will offer a more compact rear end, without revolutions, because the suspension will maintain the pull rod scheme without copying the push rod concepts of Red Bull: the shorter gearbox will move further back the engine and, therefore, the passenger compartment, by moving the radiator outlets away from the front wheel.
The exercise of cleaning and reorganizing the concepts on bases that certainly work should put the black arrows back in a position to appear more frequently at the front: Lewis Hamilton signed a one-year contract, plus an option, after having received reassurances from Allison that this year there would be no more leaps in the dark. The Englishman has been without a win since 2021 and the wait is becoming too long for a rider who still has the ambition of aiming for his eighth world title, the laurel he saw stolen in Abu Dhabi three years ago …
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