Hamilton on Mercedes F1 car design issues: “I was right”
After a poor start to the new season with their modified W14 - which has retained their unconventional ‘zeropod’ sidepods - Toto Wolff admitted Mercedes would need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new design direction in order to return to winning ways in F1.
Following a disappointing performance at the season-opener in Bahrain, Hamilton grabbed headlines by claiming Mercedes “didn’t listen” to him over the development of their latest car.
Despite conceding in Saudi Arabia that his remarks “wasn’t necessarily the best choice of words”, the seven-time world champion said Mercedes’ lack of pace shows he was ultimately right to voice his opinion.
"I'm one of those people that always likes to be right, but I'm not always right, but in this scenario I was right," Hamilton said.
"So it was good, it was like, 'I told you’.
"It's a team collaboration. At the end of the day I'm the driver not the designer, but I'm the gateway to the car's performance, so we're just working on continuously trusting each other in what we try to give back.
"They do listen to me, I mean look at the success we've had over time, so we listen to each other.
"We've had our disagreements and that's inevitable in relationships.
"What's important is just owning up to it - 'ok, I was wrong' or 'you were wrong' or whatever it is, and then just huddle up, we're a team, so how can we fix it? What are we going to do? How much energy are you going to put into it?”
Speaking after Jeddah, Mercedes technical director Mike Elliott said the team was specifically evaluating the “sidepod and floor geometry”.
“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 explained.
“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?
“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.”
