A Mercedes chief has admitted the team would be "silly" not to consider following Red Bull's lead in terms of car design this season.
The Silver Arrows have struggled for performance this season, falling from being the top team on the grid to third, and some way off both Red Bull and Ferrari. As a result, Lewis Hamilton is 98 points behind Max Verstappen, with that gap only likely to increase.
Mercedes have suffered a lot more from porpoising, while their bold sidepod design – their cars don't have any – has not paid off. The team's technical director Mike Elliott has admitted that, to try to salvage something from this season, they could take inspiration from Red Bull's car design going forward.
"The bodywork bit, the bit that's visibly different, is probably not the key differentiator, it's the detail in the floor design. We've evaluated some concepts in that direction," he said. "I'm not going to say which way we're going to go but we'll look at that.
"I think we'd be silly not to have a level of humility that you think you've potentially got it wrong and you go and look at what everybody else has done. And that's not just the Red Bull concept, that's looking at all the concepts up and down the grid and saying what looks interesting and why."
Elliott was also keen to stress, though, that just because the lack of sidepods is the obvious difference between the Mercedes cars and their rivals, it is not necessarily the only reason why they are so far off the pace. "People look at the car and they look at the differences and think 'that's massive, that's got to be the big difference that's there'," he explained.
"I think an aerodynamicist would tell you the really important bits are what's underneath the floor, the wings and the key aerodynamic structures. While the bodywork contributes to that, it's not the defining feature. It's been well-publicised the difficulty of what we've done with the narrow sidepod means you've got a big, cantilevered floor. Managing that and managing the stiffness of that is a challenge.
"I think we, like probably all of the teams, will evaluate what we've got, we'll look at what others have done and work out what we think are the right ways forward. And I think for us so far the aim has been to generate as much understanding as quickly as we can and then work out what are the right things to do from there.
"I think we need to just keep chipping away at it. We're pretty honest with ourselves, we've not started on the front foot and we just need to look at where our weakness is, look at how we improve and just keep bringing those upgrades as fast as we can and within the cost cap as well."
