Mercedes Admits: "Very Different Sidepod Coming" on W14

The W14 is going to be getting a significant upgrade.

Mercedes technical director, Mike Elliott, has given some updates on the W14 cars after the first Free Practice session ahead of the Bahrain Grand Prix.

The Brackley-based squad are looking to make a comeback after their tumultuous 2022 season which saw them struggling with many issues on the W13 cars. The team have said they have put the porpoising behind them but will still be playing catch-up with Red Bull and Ferrari in the upcoming 2023 season. 

Aston Martin's significant improvements from last year will also be putting additional pressure on the Mercedes team. 

Elliott explained during the press conference:

“Toto [Wolff, Team Principal, has] already said we’ve got a different bodywork coming; it won't be the same as other people’s and it won’t be the same as we’ve got, it’ll be different.

“It’s part of the normal development. We have got a very different sidepod coming – I say very different, a different sidepod that’s coming. I think Toto said that in the press. But it takes time to bring that. It takes time to make the bits, it takes time to change the bits that go underneath the bodywork to fit, so we’ll bring it as soon as we can,” he said after FP1.

He continued, discussing the new rear-wing Mercedes that was seen earlier this weekend:

“I guess the obvious visual difference is the rear wing. That’s something we didn’t bring to winter testing and something we’ve got here and it’s doing exactly what we expected it to do. But there’s also some set-up things we’ve changed based on the data we’ve found, on data we looked through after the test event,

“But I think we felt when we came out of winter testing, we hadn’t answered all the questions we wanted to answer – so we’ve sort of come and used [FP1] as a practice session, try and learn from that… and when you get to the sort of cooler sessions that are a bit more representative, we’ll see where we are,”