© Steve Etherington for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd.
Mercedes’ Technical Director Mike Elliot says you need more than three days “to really start seeing some of the issues” with the car.
Formula 1 teams will only have three days of pre-season testing this year, before the 2023 season starts on March 5.
Mercedes’ technical boss Mike Elliott says this is not enough to identify all potential issues with the car.
“We never really got on top of the car balance last year,” the Briton said.
“All the normal work we do at the beginning of the season didn’t happen because of the problems we were trying to rectify.
“With only three days of testing this year, that has two big impacts. The first is in reliability. If we are not reliable in the test, then we will have very limited mileage to learn.
“We also won’t be able to measure the car’s absolute reliability too much, because over three days you are not going to get huge amounts of running.
“These cars are now so reliable that you need more mileage than three days to really start seeing some of the issues.
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“The second big impact is that we’ve got to use our limited time as efficiently as possible. We’ve got to learn as much as we can, to work out how to get the most performance out of the car and what we can learn to feed into the next developments.”
However, Elliott says Mercedes is going into pre-season testing more prepared than ever.
“As we develop the car throughout the winter, we test as much as we can on rigs.
“We do everything we can to make sure that the car is reliable, and that the performance we expect is measured as best as we can.
“When we arrive at pre-season testing, we want to be as prepared as we can be but there is no substitute for the real thing. It’s running the car around a real, live racetrack that will help us learn.
“Although we go into testing this year as prepared as we have ever been, doing all the work that we need to in three days will still be tough,” Elliott concluded.
