F1 | Mercedes believes it has gained something over Red Bull

With a press release sent yesterday morning, the Mercedes confirmed James allison as technical director for years to come. In fact, it is not known for how long the English engineer will still be in the Brackley team, having been announced as a long-term renewal, effectively giving him full powers to ensure that the Anglo/German team can return to winning like in the past few years. does. It won't be easy after the disasters of the 2022/2023 designer two-year period Mike Elliot, but there is hope of having corrected several defects of the W14.

“It's impossible not to be apprehensive, excited or scared this time of year – Allison admitted to Autosport. It's always like this, but I think that even in Red Bull they are experiencing the same sensations, even after such a good year, they won't be calm in their beds at night, because no one knows where the others are at. For our part, we hope that the rear will help us a little more in 2024, and that the handling of the car will be easier. We speak clearly after the simulation, but we have good reason to believe we have gained something. You have to take everything into consideration to make the car lighter, have more downforce and hopefully a better engine."

“Time will tell if it will be enough, but it will be interesting because we saw some things that we knew were a problem, hypothesized what was causing it and we should have fixed them. It will be important to understand to what extent we have managed to make a correct diagnosis. Hopefully we have done a good job with the car and corrected some of the shortcomings highlighted in 2023. The rules themselves set a much clearer upper limit when it comes to the amount of lap time these cars are capable of producing, it's clearer compared to the last generation of single-seaters. Looking back at last year, we see that from start to finish, even though Red Bull's dominance was almost total, they didn't look vulnerable even in the last race in Abu Dhabi. Looking at the big picture, this is a grid that is gradually compressing.”