Andrew Shovlin: ‘Radical Changes’ Coming To The W14

After a horrible start to the 2023 FORMULA 1 season in Bahrain, Mercedes’ Andrew Shovlin has confirmed that ‘radical changes’ will be coming for the W14 for future races, as the former champions look to close the gap to Red Bull, Ferrari, and now their customer team, Aston Martin.

“People have tended to use the word concept when they mean the sidepod design and Toto [Wolff] had said recently that we are looking at a revision that is going to come along in the next few races anyway.

“Given the gap to the front of course we are going to look at bigger departures and more radical changes.

“But those changes take time to turn into a faster solution in the wind tunnel – you can’t do them overnight. There is quite a lot of development that you’ve got to do around any sort of big change in geometry in that area.

“Of course, we are looking at where we can improve the car, we are looking for potential to develop and you will see visible changes coming on the car over the next few races.”

Speaking about the problems experienced in Bahrain during both qualifying and the race, Shovlin added “That gap in qualifying was quite large, we were over half a second to the front. In the race that was even bigger.

“That was compounded by the fact that when you get the tyre degradation you get a bit more sliding, the tyres run hotter, and you end up finding it very difficult to keep them under any kind of control.

“There is a lot that we need to understand but the key things are really getting on top of that long run degradation, which last year was a strong point for us.

“Clearly, we’ve got something that’s not in the right place that we need to work on but ultimately the other thing is that performance gap to the front. The raw pace of the car is not good enough.

“We are working very hard at the moment to understand what we can do in the short-term future and in the mid-term future to try and get ourselves in a better place.”

While it’s clear the team has a lot of work ahead of them to return to the front, the biggest losers could be neutral F1 fans, who it seems are set to watch another season of Red Bull domination.