Horner 'surprised' Mercedes stuck with doomed car concept

Red Bull Team Principal Christian Horner was "surprised" thatMercedes stuck with their zero sidepod car concept with the W14.Both teams were staunch rivals during the 2021 campaign, but at thestart of the new ground-effect era the following year Mercedesstruggled to produce a car that matched Red Bull's RB18. The W14was meant to turn things around for the Silver Arrows, but itproduced worse results and left the team winless for the first timesince the 2011 season. Mercedes eventually changed tact midwaythrough the year, adapting a downwash design similar to Red Bulland Ferrari. This managed to salvage more podiums, with LewisHamilton ending the year third in the Drivers' Championship. Whenasked if he was shocked to see Mercedes stick with their ill-fatedcar design at the beginning of 2023, Horner told Motorsport.com :“I think what surprised us was that Ferrari had a very good carlast year. "The natural evolution of that we expected it to be avery tight contender this year. We were very surprised to seeMercedes sticking with the concepts that had clearly failed theprevious year. “If you looked around the cars in pre-season, thecars that were closest in concept to us were the Aston Martin andMcLaren.” Horner insisted that Red Bull themselves did not knowthey had produce a title-winning car capable of dominating theseason out of the box, despite managing to achieve a significantweight advantage over their 2022 challenger . “Certainly, comingout of Bahrain, we felt like, ‘we've got a really good packagehere’. But we didn't know whether it was circuit specific –temperature, conditions, asphalt," said Horner. “So, it's only whenyou've had a sample of two or three and you've gone to a couple ofcircuits that have been more troublesome, certainly for us theprevious year, like Melbourne for example, that suddenly you'rethinking, 'ok, no, this is really together'."