Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton was far from happy with the W14 that was offered to him to compete in the 2023 season.
The Silver Arrows Mercedes once again got its design wrong and although they finished the season in second place behind Red Bull, it was not much of a contest as Max Verstappen surged to his third successive world championship, with Sergio Perez making it a one-two finish for the team.
Hamilton was seen complaining about the stability of his W14 at various instances throughout the season, feeling that the rear end of the car posed constant discomfort.
However, these complaints fell on deaf ears as Mercedes chose to ignore the seven-time world champion’s feedback.
The team’s technical director James Allison has now admitted that they just did not heed the complaints coming from their ace driver and had they paid a little more attention to what he was saying, things may well have been different.
“When we were completely and utterly stuck in the bouncing hell, all we could do was fix that because that was the number one, two, and three problems,” Allison said.
Mercedes chose to focus on another specific problem, namely the porpoising of the car, which they felt needed immediate addressing.
After that, they moved to other issues such as the DRS and top speed, with Hamilton’s opinion not finding any support.
“We were not good enough at listening to the fact that Hamilton telling us something else in parallel, which is that they didn’t like the turn-in instability of the car. We just didn’t listen to him.”
Hamilton was naturally frustrated as the season progressed, especially since he felt he had an understanding of what needed to change.
To make matters worse, the design team was barely able to address the problems they themselves set out to rectify as Mercedes’ speed was far off Red Bull even as the season came to a culmination.
Discussing the problems, Hamilton said: “Last year, I told them the issues that are with the car. Like, I’ve driven so many cars in my life, so I know what a car needs, I know what a car doesn’t need.”
And I think it’s really about accountability, it’s about owning up and saying, ‘Yeah, you know what, we didn’t listen to you, it’s not where it needs to be and we’ve got to work’“.
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