Toto Wolff says Mercedes 2023 contender will perhaps look similar to its infamous W13 predecessor but underneath the skin, the German outfit’s new car will be “full of surprises”.
After dominating F1 for eight years, Mercedes came close to concluding its 2022 campaign without a single winner’s trophy to add to its impressive array of silverware.
Fortunately, George Russell saved the team’s honour by winning F1’s penultimate round in Brazil.
Mercedes is now focused on bringing to the track the car that if hopes will help it forget its botched 2022 season. And according to Wolff, the Brackley squad’s W14 silver arrow, despite its resemblance with its predecessor, will be “full of surprises”.
“The last time I saw it I thought ‘oh this looks the same [as the W13]’ but here’s hoping it’s not the same.
“I’m pretty much like you, I go into the wind tunnel and it looks like this year’s car but they say to me it’s very different underneath.
“It’s about the airflow, it’s about the weight distribution, it’s about the aero map.”
Case in point, Wolff says that the changes implemented last season on its W13 were not readily noticeable from the outside.
“Our car fundamentally changed mid-year,” he said. “We changed the concept but we couldn’t see anything on the bodywork.”
Beyond the car’s aesthetics, Wolff says Mercedes focus is on developing a competitive and more comfortable machine for its drivers, Lewis Hamilton and George Russell.
“I think we have a much better understanding of what the problems were,” explained the Austrian.
“We’ve been peeling only a layer of the onion, layers of discovering more issues and more problems, but I think we’ve come to the point that we understand pretty well why the car is not performing.
“The correlation at least is there for some tracks so it’s all in the fine detail of how can we make the car work out aerodynamically, how can we improve the ride and make it more fun?
“I think if we’re able to solve that over the winter, at least we can provide a stable platform to the drivers and we can develop it from there.”
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Wolff says Mercedes W14 will be ‘full of surprises’ F1i.com.
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