Mercedes confirms W15 upgrade plan for end of season

Mercedes track technical director Andrew Shovlin has confirmed that development of the 2024 W15 F1 car has come to an end and that no further upgrades are planned following the major package delivered at the United States Grand Prix introduced.

The W15 was a game-changer for Mercedes this season, marking the end of the team’s winless streak that started in 2022. The challenges of the ground effect era, which began that same year, had until now seemed insurmountable. However, Mercedes seems to have cracked the code on getting more performance out of the current generation of cars with the W15. Both Lewis Hamilton and George Russell achieved victories this season and even managed to challenge the dominant Red Bull several times.

As the USGP saw Mercedes struggle with the new upgrades with Hamilton and Russell lapping in the same spot on different days of the weekend, Shovlin revealed that the car is at the end of its development journey and so there is nothing left to do. add to the car this season. He told the media at the Circuit of the Americas (COTA):

“We have taken almost everything with us that we are now going to bring to the end of the year.

“That doesn’t mean that we won’t make further changes given the knowledge you gain during the races, but there are no major updates planned for us as of now.”

In addition to the rear cooling outlets, upper wishbones, sidepod intake and an improved front wing flap, Mercedes also introduced a new floor to replace the one fitted at Spa-Francorchamps. Shovlin added:

“This is a new floor – we have gone back to the update, the Spa one, in the last two races.

“Partly (because) once you get into long-haul freight with two different specs, it becomes very expensive because you’re flying in huge boxes with floors.

“So the reason we made a decision and stuck with it was mainly related to freight costs.”

He added:

“It’s not a fundamentally different concept. It is an evolution of that floor from Spa. It’s not the only change to the car. Hopefully it’s a big enough step that the achievements will be apparent.

“But we’ll see and learn what we can about it.”

Shovlin was then asked if the new floor was a damage correction step from the previous floor. He said:

‘No, because in the wind tunnel they kept following a development path.

“With the demands of the different circuits there are underlying characteristics of our car that hurt us on some of those street circuits like Baku and Singapore where you have those 90 degree corners.

“We have some difficulty with these types of corners, especially in the race. A big part of that is our challenge. It doesn’t really have to do with what we’ve done in the wind tunnel development, but for the area dynamicists, they’ve just been continuously working, and the packages are just fixed at a certain point in time where you’re going to bind it to carbon.

“But from their point of view, things change every day.” (sic)