How Mercedes became F1's greatest-ever team

What is Mercedes' secret?

How has it not only just set a new record of six consecutive drivers' and constructors' titles, but also shows no signs of stopping? Team boss Toto Wolff has an answer.

"The mindset we have in this team is permanent scepticism," Wolff says, "whether what we are doing is actually good enough."

Of course, there is a lot more to it than that, but as a starting point, as a simple concept to explain the winning machine Mercedes has become, it does a fine job.

That approach starts from the top - restlessness, reinvention and an endless quest for better are at the heart of Wolff's character - but Wolff would never say it is down to him.

He is always quick to give credit to the 1,000-plus staff members who have made Mercedes arguably the best team in Formula 1 history.

"If I were to sum it up," he says, "it's the people, the group of people working on the project, each giving it all, playing the best game in their respective position. And the strengths of the pack have made us win these championships."

There is an interesting parallel here, and it's to do with a link with the team Mercedes surpassed this year - Ferrari, winners of five title doubles in the early 2000s.

Wolff fully deserves the title he has earned himself as the most successful team boss in the history of Formula 1, for all involved have nothing but praise for his leadership 
of the team over the past seven years.

But the foundations of Mercedes' success were laid under another boss - Wolff's predecessor Ross Brawn, who left at the end of the 2013 season, a year after the Austrian took on his initial role as executive director.

Brawn is also the man who, as technical director, was central to Ferrari's earlier domination, with team boss Jean Todt, chief designer Rory Byrne and Michael Schumacher as the other key figures.

Similar results; but Brawn points out that "the circumstances of the creation of the teams was from a different reference".

"Ferrari," he says, "was a pretty big and comprehensive organisation already and really in that case it was a question of giving the people confidence and going from there.

"Jean had done a lot of work already, and [chief mechanic] Nigel Stepney and Stefano [Domenicali, the sporting director]. They were good people. But it lacked a little cohesion in the upper management, and there was this conflict between the UK [design office under John Barnard] and Italy. It's not easy to design a car in Godalming and engineer it in Maranello."

The solution to that was to move design back to Maranello under Brawn and Byrne and "bring some structure".

"Mercedes," Brawn explains, "was a different situation." Brawn had joined for 2008 when the 
team that is now Mercedes was Honda. But Honda pulled out at the end of that season.


The team was reconstituted as Brawn, with help from money Honda supplied, and famously won the championship in its first year.

But the background to the fairytale success with Jenson Button in 2009 was a painful period of job losses, and the team was down to 400 staff members by the time Mercedes bought Brawn out at the end of '09.

"There are over 1,000 people now," Brawn says. "It took a while before Mercedes really committed and that was partly my fault, or my responsibility. It wasn't until 2012 that Mercedes really decided to bite the bullet and commit fully to the things that needed to be done.

"The fascinating thing for me is there were so many people at Ferrari who went from 
not believing they could win championships to winning championships, and it was the
 same with Honda."

Brawn mentions how many of the senior figures at Mercedes were with the team long before him - among them chief designer John Owen, trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin, sporting director Ron Meadows, chief track engineer Simon Cole, chief strategist James Vowles, and Lewis Hamilton's race engineer Peter Bonnington.

"A lot of it is giving people confidence and helping people understand that they are not that different from people who are winning championships," Brawn says.

A lot, though, has changed at Mercedes since Brawn left.

In 2013, Mercedes brought in Paddy Lowe alongside Wolff to be the technical side of an executive-director partnership, and he saw the team through the first three titles. Bob Bell, appointed technical director by Brawn in '11 and who was instrumental in shaping the team, resigned in '13 and left at the end of '14.

Lowe left in early 2017 and James Allison took up the revived role of technical director under Wolff. Aldo Costa, whom Brawn appointed as engineering director to co-lead design with Owen, chose to move out gradually and recently left the company for good.

These management changes have been handled so seamlessly as to have no impact on performance. Mercedes has changed but only grown stronger under Wolff's leadership.

"We've said many times that you cannot freeze a successful organisation," Wolff says. "It's a dynamic structure and I'm proud that we're able to hand the baton smoothly to the next generation of leaders inside the team."

Wolff underlines the philosophy that has served Mercedes so well over the years: "It's about marginal gains. It's about putting everything together and not leaving one stone unturned. It's about having a no-blame culture, empowering even when it's difficult sometimes [and] when you'd rather control things.

"You need to live it in the difficult moments and that has made the strengths of the team. We've had many hiccups over the years and we've always been able to collect ourselves and understand why we haven't performed well and then come back even stronger.

"We could spend a whole day trying to analyse what I believe are the strengths of the group, but there are so many factors and so many faces come into my mind that I see through the year tired, happy, tired, happy and just pushing through."

Similar things could have been said about Ferrari in the Todt/Brawn/Schumacher era, but there are some key differences that arguably make Mercedes' achievement all the greater, and not just because it has beaten the record.

Ferrari had a number of key advantages that Mercedes hasn't. For one, Ferrari had the biggest budget in F1. Mercedes doesn't - that still belongs to Ferrari.

For another, Ferrari had bespoke tyres from Bridgestone, while Mercedes has to cope with the same Pirellis as everyone else. And Ferrari had unlimited testing, and two of its own test tracks to do it on, while Mercedes is faced with the same testing restrictions as everyone else.

On the other hand, Mercedes did start its run with one key advantage Ferrari did not. Its first championship double came with the introduction of the new turbo hybrid engine regulations, in which Mercedes invested earlier and more heavily than anyone else.

That resulted in a huge advantage over other manufacturers in 2014 - a figure Ferrari now puts at around 80bhp. However, by '15, Ferrari was within spitting distance of Mercedes, and yet the silver cars kept winning. And since '18, Ferrari has had the most powerful engine in F1, but still hasn't been able to unseat Mercedes.

In fact, in 2017 and '18, many would argue Mercedes didn't even have the best car for most of the season. It won both those titles because Ferrari and Sebastian Vettel between them made too many mistakes, while Mercedes and Hamilton have collectively operated at a level beyond the reach of anyone else.

Hamilton, in particular, has been critical to Mercedes maintaining its winning run.

Through 2014-16, pretty much any top-line driver in a Mercedes would have been champion, so great was its advantage. But the same could not be said of 2017-18, when Hamilton's consistent excellence, pace, and unmatched racing skills proved too much for Vettel, even though for the first two-thirds of each season at least the German had the best car.

In the Ferrari era, too, the driver was vital. In 2002 and '04, Ferrari was dominant. But it took all Schumacher's skills to prevent McLaren's Mika Hakkinen winning three in a row in '00. And in '01 and '03 Ferrari also faced tough competition.

2003, in particular, was hard work, and it took a controversial declaration from the FIA that the Michelin tyres used by title rivals Williams and McLaren were being run in a way that made them too wide - a ruling made following an intervention from Ferrari and Bridgestone - to make things more comfortable. After that, neither Williams nor McLaren won another race.

The irony is that it was a tyre-related rule change that eventually put the brakes on Ferrari's success. For 2005, it was decided that while refuelling would continue, drivers could use only one set of tyres during a grand prix.

"The tyre change was a big thing," Brawn says. "We had a great partnership with Bridgestone that had a certain philosophy of tyre; light, small capacity car; sprint-race format. And suddenly the rules said you had to use the same tyre all race. That was a dramatic change for us."

Ferrari won only once all year in 2005 - and that was only because all the Michelin cars pulled out of the infamous US Grand Prix on safety grounds, because Michelin had miscalculated the stresses the banked oval corner at the end of the lap would put on the tyres, and they were failing.

For 2006, tyre changes were allowed again, and Ferrari and Schumacher were competitive once more, 
but Fernando Alonso and Renault proved too strong and took a second consecutive title.

Mercedes has proved adept at coping with rule changes. The engine rules have remained fundamentally unchanged since 2014, other than a relaxation of restrictions on development.

But the chassis rules have changed significantly twice - in 2017, with the introduction of wider, faster cars; and again in '19 with the new front wing aimed at making overtaking easier. And yet Mercedes and Hamilton have just kept on winning.

Brawn says: "Once you get the organisation and you're prepared to take the time to put all the things in place and make it work, when it starts to work, it's a juggernaut.

"You get your car done and you have such comprehensive resource that you have the end car coming along while your first car is out there performing.

"And once you get on top of it, and you're out there winning races, and you're not fighting tooth and nail for a championship, you're working on the next car and giving yourself an even better opportunity for the next season. And it becomes self-perpetuating."

For Wolff, the key has been that the team has always remained hungry, chiefly by setting new objectives - to win more than one title; then to win through a regulation change; then to break Ferrari's record.

And now, for 2020, one assumes, to help Hamilton equal Schumacher's record of seven titles.

"It is very important to set the right objectives," Wolff says, "because if you do that it keeps you motivated and energised. And every year this team has set sights on a new season knowing that the points are reset to zero, that the past doesn't count and that the present and the future are most important.

"Somehow this mindset of scepticism has prevailed and we're not taking anything for granted."

There's something else, too - winning feels better than losing.

"The days we fail are the days we learn the most," Wolff says. "Because you are never leaving a track with a great victory and saying, why the hell did we win? But you leave the track saying, why the hell did we lose? Indeed the diligence of the analysis to leave no
stone unturned is much deeper and intense when you've lost.

"The pain of losing lasts many days, probably up until the next race. The enjoyment of winning disappears on the Monday morning after the grand prix. And this has kept us going."

Andrew Benson is BBC Sport's chief F1 writer