The team has been working hard on a major car revamp which it hopes will allow Lewis Hamilton and George Russell to take on Red Bull this season.
And although he knows that his chances of success depend entirely on the step forward that his rivals have taken, the technical director, James Allisonhas revealed some first positive signs about the W15.
Asked about Motorsport.com On the level of trust within the team based on some promises from the simulator, Allison said: “It’s impossible this time of year not to be apprehensive, excited or scared.”
“Those are always the emotions you feel, and I imagine that even at Red Bull, after a year of such good performance, they won’t be sleeping peacefully in their beds either because no one knows what the others are going to offer.”
“What we do have some hope for, though, is that some of the more malicious features in the back of our car will be a little friendlier to us, and the car will handle a little happier.”
“That’s all a pretense, but we have reasonable grounds to believe we’ve won something.”
Beyond the behavioral issues that made the W14 such a difficult car, Allison said other goals – including more downforce and power – had also been areas of focus.
Foto: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images
Sir Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes F1 W14, overtakes Fernando Alonso, Aston Martin AMR23
“On top of that (handling), you’ve got all the normal maintenance stuff, like making it lighter, making it have more downforce and hopefully getting a little bit of an improvement on the power unit, with adjustments at the calibration level. that can still be done with current standards,” he said.
“Time will tell if it’s enough. But it’s going to be interesting because we’ve seen some things that we knew were a problem. We’ve hypothesized what caused those problems and we’ve solved them. It’ll be interesting to find out to what extent we got that right.” diagnosis”.
Although Red Bull was dominant last year, winning all but one race, Allison believes it is not certain the Milton Keynes team will maintain its lead, and believes that while it may be too early to judge Mercedes’ chances, the new F1 regulations on ground effect will make it difficult for Red Bull to continue improving.
“We hope we have done a good job with the new car, and we hope we have fixed some of the deficiencies that were so publicly displayed with it last year,” he said.
“There’s also something on our mind, which is that the rules themselves have a much clearer upper limit on the amount of lap time these cars are capable of producing.”
“It’s a much clearer upper limit than the previous generation of cars, that the more love you gave them and the more work you put into them, the faster they were, seemingly endlessly.”
“I think if you look at last year, we see that from the beginning of the season until the end, although Red Bull’s dominance was almost total and they didn’t seem vulnerable even until the last race of the year, if you look at the big picture, this is a grid that is gradually compressing.”
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