The teams McLaren and Mercedes presented their cars for the next championship of the Formula 1 world.
The British team presented the MCL38, the car with which he aspires to compete with the best in the next F1 season, in line with what was shown in the second half of last year.
“The team has done a good job during the winter and we are confident in our ability to be competitive, although we still have things to do before the start of the season,” admitted the team director Andrea Stella.
The Italian manager seemed more convinced with this car than just a year ago when, barely reaching McLaren, presented a car already presaging a difficult start to the season.
He McLaren MCL38 It leaves many parts unpainted, another trend for carbon fiber to gain thousandths of a time, although it maintains the papaya orange and practically forgets about the blue.
At a technical level, the new McLaren It is an evolution of a car that last season started out as one of the worst and ended up as the most competitive along with Red Bull. Like Ferrari and Aston Martin, the MCL38’s nose is anchored directly to the front wing on the second element and not the first.
The pontoon entrances are larger, towards the back, in the line anticipated by Newey in Red Bull and that the rest of the teams have followed. The rear suspension of the new McLaren It is push-rod, which leaves Ferrari and Haas as the only cars that have chosen the pull-rod system in that area.
The British pilot Lando Norris finished on the podium in seven of the last thirteen races held (with six second places), while the Australian rookie Oscar Piastri He achieved two podiums and a victory in the sprint in Qatar.
“I’m dying to test the car in Bahrain. I’m sure we can maintain the line of last season,” said Norris, who will begin his sixth season with the team and with which he has already renewed with a “multi-year” contract.
New Mercedes
The team Mercedes also presented its car, the W15 He will race with it in the 2024 season and it will be the last car of the German team that the British Lewis Hamilton will get into, who will leave the German brand at the end of the year to join Ferrari in 2025.
The Mercedes W15 It recovers the color of the silver arrows on the front and in the cockpit that is combined with the aqua green color, while the rest of the car will remain black “for weight saving reasons.”
“It is not just an aerodynamic change, but many mechanical changes to make a car faster and more predictable for the drivers. We will see in Bahrain if we have achieved it,” he said. Toto Wolff, head of the Mercedes team.
The Austrian coach admitted that they have “a mountain to climb to fight on the front” and added: “There are no miracles in this sport, but our ambition and determination are strong. Since this new course was charted, development has progressed good. We had several items on our priority list for this car. We will soon see if we have taken the step we were looking for.”
Next season for Mercedes It will also have the particularity that it will be Lewis Hamilton’s last in the German team, in which he played for 11 years and with which he won six of his seven world championships.
The British pilot will leave Mercedes at the end of this year to run only from 2025 in Ferrari, but it became “the news of the year” of Formula 1 that will officially begin rolling on March 2 at the Bahrain Grand Prix, in the first of the 24 tests organized for this season
Lewis Hamilton and his teammate, George Russell, Today they spent brief moments behind the wheel of the new machine in what is considered a 15-kilometer demonstration day carried out by the team on the English circuit.
The first actual filming will take place next Tuesday in Bahrain, on the eve of the start of the official tests.
The W13 suffered greatly from bouncing and porpoising, and although Russell achieved a victory at Interlagos, the team fell to third place in the constructors’ championship.
Last year’s W14 did not fulfill the hope of taking a step forward and underwent a thorough renovation after only a few races.
He did not achieve any victory in a season dominated by Red Bull and the team scored fewer points than the previous year, although he overtook Ferrari and placed second in the championship.
The team was restructured in April, when Mike Elliott was replaced by James Allison as technical chief. Elliott then left the team in October.
The W15 is therefore the first car designed and developed under Allison’s supervision, and represents a significant change from its predecessor as the team attempts to close the gap on leader Red Bull.
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Source: Ambito
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