Its cars may be a different colour in 2023, back to the inspiring black livery in which Lewis Hamilton powered to Formula 1 world title glory in 2020 and so nearly again in 2021, but there’s a clear sense of deja vu for Mercedes. This settled in, hard, at the Bahrain Grand Prix earlier this month. But the team has already decided to twist: the W14’s car ‘concept’, begun in the infamous W13, will be abandoned.
That is despite the fact that Mercedes has finally been able to move on from the severe porpoising and ride bouncing it suffered across 2022. And the fact that last time out in the Saudi Arabian GP, it beat a Ferrari on merit in qualifying and defeated both red cars in the race, albeit with a little bit of safety car assistance.
“I don’t think this package is going to be competitive eventually,” team boss Toto Wolff concluded after qualifying in Bahrain, astonishing the F1 paddock with his frankness and decisiveness after just one session in competition, on a track renowned as an outlier. “We gave it our best shot all over the winter, and now we just need to all regroup and sit down with the engineers, who are totally not dogmatic about anything.”
So, that’s it, then. Soon, Mercedes’ striking ‘zeropod’ design will be confined to F1 folklore – remembered perhaps along with Tyrrell 025 X-wings, the McLaren MP4/10B mid-wing or Williams FW26 walrus nose as dazzling missteps. It’s that concept, and plenty of other design ideas, from the W13 of 2022 that led Mercedes to this point in time – one where it stands at the precipice of uncharted, dangerous territory for a squad that dominated F1 for nearly a decade.
As with many teams at the start of F1’s new ground-effects era, Mercedes had to spend a
