Lewis Hamilton delivered terrible news by Mercedes chief with 'school experiment' thrown out the window
Lewis Hamilton will be hoping Mercedes get it right in 2024
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Mercedes director of communications Bradley Lord insists 'everything is up for grabs' in the winter months as the team pick apart the problematic W14 and start completely from scratch, leaving them with a race against time to get everything together in time for the new season.
Lewis Hamilton and George Russell were glad to see the back of the 2023 season in what proved to be another frustrating year for Mercedes.
Neither driver was able to pick up a race win with Hamilton's last victory coming back in 2021.
Red Bull ended up extending their gap over the rest of the pack with Mercedes, Ferrari, Aston Martin and McLaren scratching their heads in trying to catch Max Verstappen.
Lewis Hamilton had an up and down year in 2023
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The Dutchman was in a league of his own as he won 19 of the 22 races in the year and he will fancy his chances of beginning 2024 on the front foot.
Lord paid his respects to Verstappen's achievement and praised Red Bull for building a dominant car.
But the Silver Arrows chief has revealed Mercedes are ripping up the rulebook back at the factory to try and get it right with the W15.
However, making so many changes comes with its risks as there is a quicker turnaround this offseason than ever before, leaving Mercedes with a race against time to get Hamilton what he wants.
He said on The Fast and The Curious podcast: "You can't not take your hat off to Max, he was incredible this year and that Red Bull is, by statistics, the most dominant car thats ever been in the sport's history.
"Toto said in Abu Dhabi that we've got Mount Everest to climb. There's a huge gap to close.
"We're pretty much changing everything.
"We all got taught in school that when you're doing an experiment to change one thing at a time, we've thrown that out the window.
"Everything is up for grabs so it's gonna be a heck of a winter to get it all on time.
"You go down to the factory and the operations guys, the bags are getting bigger under their eyes and the grey circles are getting deeper because they're working every hour.
"But we're quietly optimistic that we can get closer to Red Bull. There's only so much performance to find in these rules.
"The nature of how we run the cars right on the ground, you can't just keep adding downforce forever.
"So we are still finding good gains in the wind tunnel... we're running a 100m race in our own stadium at the minute and if someone is doing a better job then it is only a relative gain."
Hamilton regularly expressed his dissatisfaction with the W14 throughout the year and he cut a glum figure at the season finale in Abu Dhabi.
But Lord believes Hamilton is still "proud" of how he competed in the year to finish third in the Drivers' Championship.
"I think he had some relatively high highs and some pretty low lows in terms of what the car was doing for him," Lord added.
"To turn up in Brazil where he's an icon and almost a successor to Ayrton Senna and then for us to have such an absolute shocker of a weekend, that was emotionally tough.
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Mercedes are ripping up the W14
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"But I think he's pretty proud of the craftmanship of this season. Not everything was perfect, there were some things that went wrong but overall I think he's pretty proud how he stuck to it, worked on himself and worked with the team to put the team and the car in a much better place by the end of the year.
"Hopefully we're on that upward trajectory now." at least 1 paragraphs
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