The once-conquering F1 team Mercedes-AMG Petronas is in a quagmire.
It is a distant fourth in the Formula 1 constructors’ championship, and most of its race results this year have been in the bottom half of the top 10.
“We have to accept that we are the fourth fastest team at the moment,” George Russell, one of the team’s drivers, said earlier this month at a media session after the Miami Grand Prix. “Lap times don’t lie, the championship doesn’t lie, here we are. We are fighting for the P5 to P8 area week in, week out at the moment.”
Mercedes won a record eight consecutive constructors’ championships from 2014 to 2021. Mercedes and Ferrari battled for top honors in 2022 and 2023. Ferrari beat Mercedes into second place in 2022, before Mercedes narrowly repaid the favor in 2023. The last time he won a Grand Prix was in Brazil in 2022.
But 2024 was Mercedes’ worst start to a season since 2011.
Mercedes kept faith with the 2022-spec design philosophy until 2023 before admitting in last year’s first race that it had made a mistake, but the team has yet to fix the car.
Mercedes didn’t expect to catch the dominant Red Bull, but they have slipped away from Ferrari and an ever-improving McLaren is third. The top three teams have already won races this year and McLaren’s transformation from also winners has further strengthened Mercedes’ stagnation because it supplies McLaren with its power units.
Mercedes’ 2024 car is more balanced than its predecessor, but is sensitive to small changes in track conditions, further hindering the team’s understanding of the car. The early rounds were spent experimenting with different setups in an elusive search for a breakthrough.
In-car sensors as well as virtual modeling showed an increase in downforce, but without the expected greater efficiency. This caused further confusion for the team, indicating that their measuring tools were not working properly and the result was Mercedes heading down blind alleys as they tried to solve the problem.
“We know that probably some of the changes that we’ve made since the end of last year maybe overcompensated with some of the growth stuff that we’ve done,” Russell said. “We have car restrictions now, which is a completely different restriction to what we had this time 12 months ago. We did so much work to solve the problems. We have come a long way in this direction. So we know we have to improve and we have to improve fast.”
Mercedes is gradually understanding these limitations and update packages have been introduced in the last two rounds, but the gains are relative.
“The thing at the moment is that everyone else is developing their cars, so you saw McLaren with a big package [in Miami], and they seem to have progressed,” said Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ track engineering director. “The handling issues drivers have to deal with make it hard to see all this performance as a straight step forward.”
“What we tend to find,” he added, “is that the car from session to session can behave quite differently, and until we overcome that, we’re always going to dilute the benefit we can get from these types of updates. A lot of hard work is being done, but hopefully we will soon start to see the fruits of it.”
These updates aren’t likely to turn Mercedes back into a competitor any time soon.
“We don’t expect to go to Monaco and suddenly look super fast,” said Sovlin. “We’re all doing all the normal preparation work, but essentially, we have to evolve our way out of this problem by bringing performance updates to the car. This is what we are working on. And then on the track, we’ll just try to optimize what we have as best we can, pick up as many points as we can in the meantime.”
Toto Wolff, the team principal, said that Mercedes now at least “understands a lot more what it takes to get the car to a better place” and “why we race and where we race”.
“It’s been an arduous, painful learning curve and it’s still not satisfying, but the situation is more encouraging now,” he said.
Mercedes’ task is to improve the car and then produce a stronger one for 2025. And if that wasn’t enough, the team also has to find a replacement for its star man, Lewis Hamilton, who will be leaving the team a year early to join Ferrari for 2025.
Hamilton, who has won seven drivers’ titles, has raced for Mercedes since 2013 and his departure will mark the end of a hugely successful era, including the last three underwhelming seasons.
Mercedes must find a replacement for a totemic figure, a scenario that did not wait until the Hamilton bombshell.
Its prized driver Andrea Kimi Antonelli, 17, from Italy, who competes in Formula 2, is a candidate for the seat and has begun private testing with Mercedes.
But Mercedes doesn’t want to rush his development.
“He needs to concentrate on his Formula 2 campaign,” Wolff said. “He’s been doing a lot of testing for us to get him up to speed.”
Carlos Sainz, who will be replaced at Ferrari by Hamilton, will also be available, but with Antonelli set to drive for Mercedes eventually, if Sainz is indeed approached he will not be offered a lengthy deal.
Wolff has publicly stated that he would like to bring in reigning three-time champion Max Verstappen if he decides to opt out of his Red Bull contract which expires in 2028. There is no indication that Wolff has spoken to the driver.
“It’s all in his hands,” Wolff said. “He is the top driver. He’s the top man right now, and that’s why he has to make these decisions. There may be no decision to make. Maybe everything will continue as it is. And this is also guidance for us.”
