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Mercedes’ Technical Director James Allison says the team has “reasonable grounds to believe” that “the more spiteful characteristics of the rear end of our car will be a bit more friendly” and the “handling of the car a happier thing”.
After it was announced that Mercedes Technical Director James Allison has signed a long-term extension of his contract, the Briton came out with optimistic news about the team’s 2024 car.
“It’s impossible at this time of year to be anything other than apprehensive, coupled with excited, coupled with frightened,” he told Motorsport.
“Those are always the emotions that you feel, and I would imagine that even in Red Bull, after a year of such good performance, they will not be sleeping easy in their beds either because no one knows what everyone else will deliver.
“However, what we do have some hope for is that some of the more spiteful characteristics of the rear end of our car will be a bit more friendly to us, and the handling of the car a happier thing.
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“That’s all in simulation, but nevertheless we’ve got reasonable grounds to believe that we’ve made some gain there.”
Allison then listed some other improvements the team is hoping to make with the new car.
“On top of that [handling], you’ve got all the normal housekeeping type stuff of just making it lighter, making it more ‘downforcy’ and hopefully getting a bit of uplift from the power unit side, with the calibration level tinkering that they’re still capable of doing under these current rules.
“Whether it’s enough, time will tell. But it’s nevertheless going to be interesting because we saw some things we knew were problems, we have hypothesized what the reason for those problems were, and we fixed those reasons.
“It will be interesting to find out how accurate we’ve been with that diagnosis,” the Briton concluded.
