There can be no illusions for Lewis Hamilton and Mercedes as to where they stand in Formula One’s pecking order despite returning their best finish of the season at Sunday’s Australian Grand Prix. Melbourne was their first celebratory moment thus far, but that they revelled in a second place is indicative of the mountain they have to climb. For a team that has dominated F1 for so long this is perhaps their greatest challenge yet.
Hamilton is no stranger to battling with an uncompetitive car, but the team this season will truly test their mettle. On a roll of eight constructors’ championships in a row between 2014 and 2021, confidence and control went hand in hand with a calm sense of direction. All of which is easier to maintain with a winning car.
Now, with the advantage gone, this season’s car having been built with a flawed design philosophy and the team struggling to maintain their place in the front three, the task is more onerous and the pressure far greater than it was when Hamilton was romping home at the front of the grid.
The nexus of this intense endeavour is the team principal, Toto Wolff. As much as it is a problem for the team to be addressed collectively, the focus will be on how Wolff handles it. It is his toughest assignment since he joined Mercedes in 2013.
After the opening race of the season in Bahrain, when it was clear how far off the pace the W14 was, Wolff was sombre, unusual for a man who is generally of good humour even on the tough days. His blunt admission matched his mien. They had gone down a dead-end street in developing an evolution of last season’s model and he confirmed Mercedes would immediately pursue a new design direction, in effect starting afresh with the season under way.
This was no failing in manufacturing or preparation. They had hit their design targets – it was simply that said targets did not produce the expected performance. The car suffers an unholy combination of being draggy and lacking downforce.
The Mercedes trackside engineering director, Andrew Shovlin, has admitted the team identified the limits of the car before the season began from wind tunnel testing, but by then they had already committed. Bahrain and Saudi Arabia exposed how extensive those limitations were. A winter of refinement and adjustment was expected to unleash the performance of a car that had steadily improved in 2022. Instead, it had already reached as far as it could go.
Wolff was honest in admitting how they had gone down a blind alley. “We had the perfect storm last year,” he said. “The car got better and better and then you start to question the concept of the car less than you probably should.”
A major redesign is a process that will take months to achieve and months further to refine. Its new direction will not be seen until Imola in mid-May, but how it pans out is now the defining feature of Mercedes’ 2023 season and will affect where they may be in 2024. Get it rightand they could start catching Red Bull and be in a position to hit the ground running next season.
They know it will not be that simple. The cost cap means there is a restriction on how much resources they can sink into the task. The $135m limit rules out building an entirely new car and major elements of the current edition will have to be maintained. It seems likely that the W14B will be something of a hybrid until next year’s model.
The lead for this project is the Red Bull, who have been dominant and demonstrated their design philosophy has best exploited the new regulations. Indeed, Aston Martin, taking their cues from last year’s title-winner, have proved gamechanging as they leapfrogged Mercedes and Ferrari to join the big three at the front.
That Mercedes will probably follow suit seems clear. Wolff has said he would feel no shame in following the Red Bull example. “It just needs to be the quickest possible race car,” he said. “If that car looks like a Red Bull, or like SpaceX, I don’t care, it just needs to be quick. And if it’s a Red Bull, we will put a little bull sticker somewhere …”
It is an admission that was unthinkable for almost a decade, but representative of the seriousness of Mercedes’ travails.
Wolff noted the improvement at Albert Park was almost certainly down to the track and it was not going to change their pursuit of a radical new direction. Hamilton saluted it as an amazing result given where they had been in the opening two rounds and even posited the hope that: “We can close that gap. It’s going to be tough but not impossible.”
In the halcyon days when the wins were flowing, he and Wolff would always stress Mercedes “win and lose as a team”. The greatest test of the team culture they have strived to engender at Brackley is right here, right now, inhow they deal with coming back from the latter.
