Mercedes F1 Guru James Allison spills the beans on the mind-blowing makeover coming to the 2024 W15 car!
James Allison says changes to team processes will ensure a different-looking challenger for Lewis Hamilton and George Russell to drive
After securing eight consecutive constructors’ titles, Mercedes struggled to adapt to the new design regulations in 2022, winning just one race across the last two seasons as Red Bull dominated the scene.
Explaining what he believes are misconceptions around the term ‘concept,’ Allison detailed the process that is likely to result in Mercedes’ 2024 challenger looking notably different from its predecessors.
“For a designer or a performance person in F1, concept has nothing to do with the car,” he told Sky Sports F1. “It’s about a process where you decide what good looks like and what bad looks like. It’s your methodology for sieving out the many things you might put on the car and finding only the ones that will add lap time. The car itself is just the output of that method.
“When you talk to us about concept, we’re hearing, ‘What, you think our wind-tunnel weighting system wasn’t right?’ And we’ve changed that, or our way of meshing in CFD was wrong, and we’ve changed the concept of that.
“That’s what concept means to us, and the car just pops out at the far side of that when we apply that process and that concept.
“The last two years have required us to adjust our approach, methodology, and concept. As a result, the hardware that pops out on the far side will necessarily be different because it’s defined by different decisions and weightings of what’s important and what isn’t.”
Mercedes is set to launch its new W15 car on February 14, and team principal Toto Wolff has committed to remaining in his position until the end of the 2026 season.
Regarding the sidepods of the W14 car, Allison acknowledged their visual impact but emphasized that the team’s failings were not solely attributed to this feature. He stated, “I would say that’s from the tip of the nose to the very back of the tail, which was not a competitive one. The most visually notable aspect of that was our sidepods, but by no means the definitive factor.”
Allison addressed the need for Mercedes to learn from their challenges and the time it took to determine the right direction, highlighting that while the sidepods symbolized the team’s struggle, they were not the sole determinant of their fate.
