Mercedes is looking forward to the 2023 season with determination and optimism after a difficult year in 2022. The team is prepared to compete with Red Bull for the championship titles after enduring numerous issues with their W13 vehicle, F1 News: including porpoising issues that resulted in back injuries for Lewis Hamilton.
Norbert Haug, a former manager of the Mercedes team, claims that the team will come back strong in 2023 and be ready to take on the competition right away.
Haug is of the opinion that Mercedes will have a much better start to the 2023 season than they did in 2022. This won’t make things any easier for Ferrari and Frederic Vasseur, their new team principal.
Mercedes was able to make significant improvements toward the end of the season despite the difficulties they faced this year. This was most evident when George Russell won the Brazilian Grand Prix for the first time, a significant achievement for the young driver.
Haug, who led Mercedes-Benz Motorsport for more than 23 years, has firsthand experience with the dedication and hard work required to succeed in the fiercely competitive Formula One world. He believes that the team’s difficulties this year will only serve to inspire them to get better and return stronger in 2023.
Mercedes won’t begin 2023 as seriously as 2022, which won’t make it more straightforward for Ferrari under new administration.
The unofficial pre-season shakedown in Barcelona served to suggest that this was a challenger that would struggle to yield a ninth Constructors’ title in succession, as the Silver Arrows warned that their W13 was struggling for pace.
Although Mercedes believed that their Bahrain package, which brought the W13 closer to race setup with the zero-pod solution, would prove to be a significant step, porpoising was a particular issue that Mercedes discovered on filming day and in Barcelona.
That absolutely prevents very clear and sensible shakedown running for the day of filming.
At Silverstone, we did lower the ride heights to more normal levels and observed this phenomenon. However, little was known about it or what was causing it.
” What issues exist? What can you do to stop what was going on with the porpoises?’
“At the time, about the best thing you could do was simply lift the vehicle off the ground, give up performance, and manage it that way.
Compared to the race one package, that car was defined much, much earlier in the development program.
The problem was that the porpoising was on a whole new level when we fitted it. The vast majority of the presentation that we planned to add didn’t emerge in light of the fact that we needed to lift the vehicle considerably further and by then you were unable to dispose of the skipping.”
It was extremely pleasing to observe how quickly the Silver Bolts recovered from the unexpected sledgehammer Mercedes received.
Despite the fact that a title challenge was unlikely, the latter stages of the campaign were significantly more promising after the shaky beginnings of the Spanish and Hungarian Grand Prix.
The season’s high point was without a doubt the team’s one and only victory, a one-two finish in Brazil. Although Mercedes’ performance in the Bahrain test made it appear unlikely that the team would reach such a high level, consistency remained a problem.