Lewis Hamilton has not been afraid to be open about his thoughts on the performance of the Mercedes W14 so far this season, criticising the design.
“Last year, I told them the issues that are with the car. Like, I’ve driven so many cars in my life, so I know what a car needs, I know what a car doesn’t need,” Hamilton told the BBC’s Chequered Flag podcast.
“And I think it’s really about accountability, it’s about owning up and saying ‘yeah, you know what, we didn’t listen to you, it’s not where it needs to be and we’ve got to work’.”
“When you’re driving, you feel like you’re sitting on the front wheels which is one of the worst feelings to feel when you’re driving a car,” Hamilton explained.
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In front of reporters, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff supported Hamilton’s view, highlighting that he is also “not happy where the team, where the car has been developed to.”
However, former Formula 1 team boss Eddie Jordan believes that the comments from Hamilton will have caused a rift back at the team’s base between himself and Wolff.
“As a team owner you wouldn’t have liked it,” Jordan told Express Sport.
“However, if I was a driver and I heard the team owner saying that ‘I think the engineers have let us down and they have missed something here, and they have missed something there’, I’m critical of Toto and I’m critical of the team.
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“With the power and might and the knowledge and the backing they’ve had, Mercedes should be at least competitive to give us, the paying punters, a really good fight.
Mercedes is on the verge of implementing a set of upgrades, having been working hard during the April break to fix their performance issues.
“The machine is continuing to run in Brixworth and Brackley at a fast pace. What you see on track is only the tip of the iceberg, but the performance of the car and Power Unit is made in these two factories,” Wolff said on the Mercedes-AMG website.