While work is advanced on Mercedes’ 2024 challenger as the team focus🔜es their efforts on closing the gap to Red Bull over the winter, development on the W14 has not completely stopped. 

Mercedes will bring a new floor to this weekend’s U💝S GP at Austin, but the upgrade’s importance goes beyond immediate performance gains. 

“Hopefully it will give us a bit♈ of lap time,” Mercedes technical direc🐼tor James Allison said at the Qatar Grand Prix. “That’s always a benefit.

“But it is mostly a useful thing because it’s a bellwether for whether we’re on the right ෴track.

“In lap time terms, it will be small. Useful,ꦑ but don’t expect us to have leapt past Max [Verstappen].”

Mercedes’ 2022 and 2023 campaigns have been hampered by their troubꦓled and inconsistent W13 and W14 cars, prompting a fu🔴ndamental design change for next season. 

Allison said Mercedes now have a “very clear idea of what we need to p🐼ut right”. 

“I think that much of what ails us now is reasonably well-understood and we’re wor💝king to fix that,” he explained. 

“I feel like all of us got a pretty clear-sighted view of what we want to do with the car. This championship, while we haven’t made the really impressive progress that McLaren have, we have nevert🔯heless been charting a pa🃏th through the season that gives us a very clear idea of what we need to put right.

“So that mꦺakes the next years fun, very exciting to look forward to, and actually this period of the year extremely enjoyable."