Mercedes W15 upgrades: The ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ updates explained

Mercedes have brought significant improvements of late, which yielded their best combined result of the season in Canada.

Toto Wolff has said there has been more than just a front wing upgrade for the Mercedes W15 that has helped the team move forward in recent F1 2024 races.

Mercedes earned their best combined result of the season in Canada last time out, with George Russell earning Mercedes’ first podium of the season in third place while Lewis Hamilton followed just behind in fourth after Russell had taken pole position.

Toto Wolff: Mercedes have new parts ‘visible and invisible for the eye’

Following the arrival of a new front wing in Monaco, both Mercedes cars had the part fitted for the Canadian Grand Prix alongside some minor updates to the car, though Wolff explained that the upgrades put on the car have all played their part in different ways.

While a list of mechanical updates for each team is made available to the media at each race weekend, Wolff said what has changed underneath the W15 has also been a factor in bringing the team closer to their front-running rivals of late.

“Sometimes when you bring a highly visible part, like the bodywork or front wing, that is pretty much the talk of what has changed the performance,” Wolff said.

“The truth is we have over the last three races brought so many new parts visible and invisible for the eye, that have contributed milliseconds to more performance – and I think this is where those marginal gains then have that positive effect. And that was just a huge effort of the factory, so I think the wheel has started to get some real motion now.”

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When asked about just how much the team have gained with their recent upgrades, Wolff remained tight-lipped but did confirm they will be bringing more upgrades to the next round, the Spanish Grand Prix in Barcelona.

“I can’t tell you,” Wolff responded when asked about Mercedes’ recent gains.

“Sometimes when things work, interact well with each other, the overall flow structure becomes more efficient, you’re able to optimise the ride height and it’s bit by bit.

“We have found we’ve added more performance. So another step in Barcelona and hopefully we will see it on the stopwatch.

“There’s no such thing as this ‘silver bullet’ in Formula 1, and therefore it was a constant work of understanding what was wrong.

“I know that everybody got tired by this answer, but you can’t reverse engineer the performance of the car and say: ‘We’re looking at a Red Bull and this is what we want our car to look [like].’

“You really need to work your way through the problems, and it didn’t seem to correlate between the tunnel and the track and the car was difficult to drive.

“Ride was not good, we had the bouncing or bottoming coming back, and then we had a clear indication of what we were missing in the jigsaw. We put the piece in and I think now it’s going.”

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