Mercedes continued to rely on design for too long, now everything has to change

After a couple of bad years for Mercedes, George Russell is now confident that the team has started down the right path with the developments of the W15. According to him, the team has taken more time for development and learned from their mistakes.

After a tough title fight in 2021, the Mercedes team, like Red Bull Racing for that matter, did not have the chance to start early on the development of the car for the new season. The new technical regulations in 2022 made it difficult for Mercedes to properly design the car to the new conditions. They completely missed the mark with their sidepod design.

Nevertheless, the Mercedes team did not want to give up on the design yet and continued driving with this design in 2023. When results failed to materialise this season as well, the team concluded that they should go in a different direction with the car's design.

Many changes in the W15

Mercedes team boss-Toto Wolff recently said that “There's almost every component that's being changed because only by doing that, I think we have a chance (in 2024)''. The changes are in the chassis, weight distribution and airflow, among others.

Mercedes driver-George Russell is positive heading into the upcoming season. ''I am more confident going into this [2023-2024 winter] break. Because Mercedes has been working on the new [W15] concept for a long time and there’s been so much due diligence gone into that concept. Whereas I think last year it was all a bit rushed,'' he told Autosport.com and others.

“We didn’t have all the information to hand, we may have jumped to a couple of conclusions without thoroughly going through the consequences. And we learned when the car hit the ground this year that we made a step forward in some regards, but it came with a lot of baggage and we hadn’t taken that into consideration.''  

All the eggs were in one basket at Mercedes

“So, I think we’ve done a great job to truly understand what we need. We’ve obviously had a further 12 months’ experience to further understand the car and what brings the performance.''

''I think last year we put all our eggs in one basket and that wasn’t a basket that provided the performance we were expecting. But, the fact is we’ve got to close a huge gap. The Red Bull dominance this year is probably the greatest - I think statistically it is the most dominant car ever - so we’ve all got a huge task on our hands.
But I’m definitely confident we won’t fall into some of the same traps we did this year.”