The season’s first race has pushed Mercedes into the desperation zone, as the Silver Arrows are almost a second slower than their rivals Red Bull as per the Bahrain race projections. It has reportedly prompted Toto Wolff to seek the restoration of his former aide James Allison’s services in the team.
According to the reports, Allison has some upgrades to make, but they’ll only be enforced from the Imola race. Meanwhile, Mercedes engineer Andrew Shovlin has also talked about the radical changes that could be made in the car.
That drastic change could be Mercedes scrapping their ‘innovative zero sidepod’ concept. Something which the F1 team flaunted last year’s preseason testing, but it hasn’t brought in anything standout for them. But removing that would solve their issues?
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Mark Hughes claims James Allison’s ideas could do nothing for Mercedes
The Race.com’s editor Mark Hughes was asked about what would happen if Mercedes successfully implemented their new upgrades and zero sidepods were removed. He thinks that it would be surprising if it builds into anything.
“I would be very surprised,” said Hughes to The Race F1 Podcast. “You start from scratch if you want to do it in a way Red Bull and Aston Martin have. I would be surprised if it’s even feasible to do it. They would have understood some of the deficit is coming from a part of this broad concept and will be a little tweak.”
He doesn’t think Mercedes would be able to make transformative changes. Rather, they’ll make small changes. The task expected by Mercedes seems to be too intricate for them to solve by May.
No point in scrapping the 2023 season
Hughes also opposed Mercedes’s idea of scrapping this year’s car to focus on 2024. However, Hughes thinks that would be futile as Mercedes would have their own literature to refer to.
He believes like this year, their opposition would also build on from the existing time and could go faster. Thus, Mercedes would only be stuck in the loop.
At present, Mercedes is conspicuously the fourth fastest car on the grid. Their main priority would be to get faster than Aston Martin first, as Wolff has already conceded that they won’t have any chance in the championship fight.
Even for the next year, the Mercedes boss didn’t seem optimistic. During the post-race interview, he claimed that Mercedes could now hold the vision for the coming two to three seasons to plan a comeback.
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