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Mercedes technical director Mike Elliott recently stated that the term 'changing the car concept' implies a complete rethink from the team regarding the car's design philosophy. After the first race of the season where the Silver Arrows put in a disappointing performance, Toto Wolff stated that the team will be focussing on a different concept for the rest of the season.
The Mercedes boss believes that the current concept won't take the team to the top of the championship.
Since then, there have been a lot of questions about what a change in concept exactly means for Mercedes. During the 2023 F1 Saudi Arabian GP debrief, Mike Elliott elaborated on what changing the car concept means to the team. He said:
"The simple answer is it means different things to different people. I think after Bahrain we had to accept we weren’t where we wanted to be, so we had to look at all the things that make up our car and work out what could we be doing differently, how could we get more performance because there is a significant gap for us to catch up to the front."
Elliott added:
"So, the engineers are busy looking at aerodynamics, they are looking at the shape of the car, things like the sidepod geometry, the floor geometry, have we missed a trick?"
"We want to be competing at the front" - Mercedes director
Further stressing the point, Elliott said that the team is keeping an eye on every possible avenue from where it can extract pace and make improvements to the package. He said:
"But we are also looking in the simulation world; are we targeting the right things, are we pushing the aerodynamics in the right direction, looking at the mechanical setup of the car. Are there things there that we are missing?"
"What else can we bring to the car that is going to add performance and we try to do that as fast as we possibly can because we want to get back to the front, we want to be competing at the front and the only way we are going to do that is by accepting we are not in the position we want to be and fighting and working really hard to get back there."
Mercedes are trying to make significant improvements to catch Red Bull at the front of the grid. However, it seems unlikely that they will get anywhere close to the Austrian team this season.
