Mercedes discloses what it needs to 'improve' in car to be 'competitive' in 2023 F1 season

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin has given us a look into their resolution path for next year. Team Mercedes struggled immensely in 2022, failing to match up to the race leaders at any point.

In the latest debrief video, Shovlin spoke about various issues Mercedes faced at Suzuka. He further elaborated on the changes they will have to make in the W14,

"As it happens, the DRS was never enabled, and that meant that overtaking was very, very hard and perhaps the right decision would have been a lower downforce setting. But fundamentally, one of the things that we need to improve on the car for next year is to get the car to have more downforce at the lower drag levels and then we can race those lighter wings and still be competitive in the corners."

Mike Elliott, ahead of the 2022 F1 Japanese GP, also explained why the Silver Arrows are lagging behind so much compared to the likes of Red Bull and Ferrari,

"The issues we’ve built into the car we couldn’t see because of the bouncing. We thought ‘we’re in, we’re going in the right direction’, and then got a proper kick in the teeth. You peel the next layer off the onion, if you like, and you’ve got another problem that was the one we’d really baked into the car in the winter."

Mercedes struggled a lot with 'porpoising' in the first half of the season. While they have managed to overcome that problem, the team has still made no improvement in terms of straight-line speed. At Suzuka, they were eight to ten kilometers per hour slower than the RB-18, and six to eight kilometers per hour slower than Ferrari and Alpine.

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Mercedes boss details budget cap loopholes that can help teams

Toto Wolff recently opened up about the overspending issue related to the Red Bull budget cap fiasco. He explained that even overspending half a million can propel a team to great advantage.

While talking to the media, the Mercedes boss made it clear that the teams in breach had an advantage,

“We can see that there are two top teams that are just about the same and there is another team that spends more. We know exactly that we’re spending – three and a half million a year in parts that we bring to the car. So then you can see what difference it makes to spend another $500,000. It would be a difference.”

The FIA has found Red Bull and Aston Martin guilty of breaching the 2021 cost cap. It has been reported that the Austrian team overspent around $7 million to $7.25 million, which might or might not have given them the advantage. However, there have been no updates on the report yet.