"We’re very open-minded" - Mercedes chief accepts old concepts not good enough as 8x F1 constructors champions target big changes

Mercedes trackside engineering officer Andrew Shovlin recently spoke about how his team will bring drastic changes to their car in 2024.

Ever since 2022, the Brackley-based team have been unable to fight for drivers' and constructors' championships due to several car-related issues. In the middle of 2023, they finally started ditching some of the old concepts and brought new upgrades. Now they aim to improve even more in the 2024 F1 season.

According to GPBlog, Andrew Shovlin initially stated that Mercedes will not be clinging to old concepts and will be open to change. Whether they will resolve all the issues will depend on the various projects that they are working on next year.

"We're certainly not clinging on to any concepts that we have had before. We're very open-minded," Shovlin said. "We are changing the car quite considerably for next year, but whether or not we can solve all the issues that we've got on the handling, that will depend on a number of projects delivering. [They] are underway and they're not complete. We've got some good directions to try and improve that."

Shovlin assured that Mercedes have planned loads of changes for their 2024 F1 car. However, it is too early to say whether these changes will work as intended.

"The car will be different. We've made a lot of changes to it, but it's very early in the development of a new car to be able to say, we've got it sorted. When we launched our best cars in 2015 or 2019, those years, we didn't know that they were going to be great cars when we developed them," he said.

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F1 pundit feels Lewis Hamilton always wanted to stay teammates with Valtteri Bottas in Mercedes

F1 pundit Peter Windsor feels Lewis Hamilton would have always wanted Valtteri Bottas to be his teammate at Mercedes.

This was primarily due to the balance Bottas would have created by being the second driver, much like Max Verstappen and Sergio Perez in Red Bull.

Hamilton has also mentioned that Bottas was his favorite teammate in his entire F1 career.

Speaking on his YouTube channel, Peter Windsor said:

"Lewis always wanted to keep Valtteri, not necessarily because he loved Valtteri but because it was the right balance of the team. He could feel that. That was the same as Max Verstappen [and] Sergio Perez. It came to the surface more than ever before, I think, in the Japanese Grand Prix."