Formula 1 News: Will the 2024 Mercedes be a ‘Black Red Bull’?

Lewis Hamilton and his Mercedes team have been spying on the Red Bull RB19 all season, hoping to copy as much of it as possible for 2024.

–by Mark Cipolloni–

They say, if you can’t beat them, join them.  Or, in Mercedes case, copy them.

But will James Allison and his design team make the 2024 W15 a ‘Black Red Bull’, just like 2020 Racing Point F1 car was an exact copy of the Mercedes and dubbed the ‘Pink Mercedes‘?

Mercedes’ technical director James Allison danced around the topic when asked by Sky Sports.

“These things are such philosophical conversations but to the mind of a designer, or a performance person in Formula 1, concept is actually nothing to do with the car,” he told Sky’s post-season review.

“Nothing whatsoever to do with the car.

“It’s about a process by which you decide what good looks like, and what what bad looks like.

“It’s Mercedes’ methodology for sorting out all the many, many things you might put on the car and finding only the ones that you really think are going to add lap time. It’s a method.

“The car itself is just the output of that method.

“So when you talk to us about concepts, we’re hearing like what you think our wind tunnel weighting system wasn’t right, and we’ve changed that. Or our way of measuring CFD [computational fluid dynamics] was wrong and we’ve added we’ve changed the concept of that. That’s what concept means to us.

“And the car just pops out of the far side of that when we apply that process and that concept.

“So of course the last two years have required us to adjust our approach and our methodology, our concept if you will, and as a result of that the hardware that pops out the far side of that will necessarily be different hardware because it’s defined by different decisions and different weightings of what’s important and what isn’t.”