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With Allison and team principal Toto Wolff both recently signing new three-year contracts, the suggestion is they have confidence in a car in which almost every component has been changed.
One of the main issues of the W14, as Mercedes failed to win a grand prix during a season for the first time in 12 years, was its instability at the rear, a characteristic under braking that proved deeply unsettling for drivers Lewis Hamilton and George Russell, costing them lap time.
In overhauling the car for this year, there is optimism Mercedes will recover performance and find itself pushing Red Bull far harder than it has over the past two years under the current aerodynamic regulations.
Offering an insight into what to expect from the W15, Allison said: “It’s impossible at this time of the year to be anything other than apprehensive, coupled with excited, coupled with frightened. Those are always the emotions that you feel.
“I would imagine that even in Red Bull, after a year of such good performance, they will not be sleeping easy in their beds either because no one knows what everyone else will deliver.
“However, what we do have some hope for is that some of the more spiteful characteristics of the rear-end of our car will be a bit more friendly to us and the handling of the car a happier thing.
“That’s all in simulation, but we’ve got reasonable grounds to believe that we’ve made some gain there.
“Then, on top of that, you’ve got all the normal housekeeping type stuff of just making it lighter, making it more ‘downforcey’ and hopefully getting a bit of uplift from the power unit side with the calibration level tinkering that they’re still capable of doing under these current rules.
“Whether it’s enough, time will tell, but it’s going to be interesting because we saw some things we knew were problems, we’ve hypothesised what the reason for those problems were and we’ve fixed those reasons.
“It will be interesting to find out how accurate we’ve been with that diagnosis.”
Despite the belief Mercedes has eradicated issues and the W15 will at least be more of a challenger to Red Bull, Allison feels he is right to still express apprehension as to what will ultimately materialise on track.
“On the technical side at least, I don’t think any team has ever been anything other than apprehensive at this time of year, alongside excited, or whatever,” he said.
“But I think you’d have to be psychotic to be bullishly confident because you only know one side of the equation, which is what you’ve done.
“There have been years where you’ve run a car for the first time and the driver’s sort of got out and said, ‘Well, spend your bonus, this is a brilliant one’.
“But even then you don’t really believe it until you get to the track and start using it in anger, and everyone else is alongside you.”
The W15 will be launched online from Silverstone on February 14. Following a traditional shakedown, the car will hit the track for the first time in anger during pre-season testing in Bahrain on February 21-23.
