How a Honda F1 failure demonstrates massive Mercedes progress

The team at Brackley had such expectations of the year ahead. An intriguing livery to show off, drivers determined to prove points. And it all fell apart, horribly.

No, we’re not still stuck in Formula 1 season review mode. As the hubbub and excitement of December have long since made way for the bleaker but differently important days of January, we know this is a good time to reflect. Change, if you want to. Or embrace what you’ve got – but have a good old think about it, nevertheless. Because doing the same things over again will, of course, only yield the same results.

That Brackley team did change. And right now, F1 is witnessing the true, lasting results of its transformation from its days as Honda in 2007. Briefly stepping back to 2022, what the now Mercedes squad achieved is precisely what it couldn’t 15 years ago. And it did so in part because it had been through that painful process.

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The RA107 had quite the start to F1 life. It was fully launched at London’s Natural History Museum and featured a bold livery concept – eschewing sponsorship decals to instead highlight the world’s climate crisis.

Jumping forward in time again, we should reflect on how even with its 2030 carbon neutral aim, F1 still hasn’t solved the hypocrisy in this area Sebastian Vettel so wonderfully acknowledged on BBC ‘Question Time’ last year. Yet, the 'Honda Earth car' was at least a laudable effort in using the championship’s massive reach to highlight one of the great crises of our time.

But, on-track, it was a dud – undone by a major aerodynamic imbalance that meant it lacked braking stability and robbed drivers Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello of confidence and, ultimately, speed. Junior team Super Aguri – essentially running the 2006 Honda design that had brought Button his first F1 win and so raised expectations of a 2007 Honda title challenge – only dropped behind in the constructors’ standings thanks to Button’s fine drive in the wet in China, the season’s penultimate race.

Such were Honda's struggles in 2007 that it regularly scrapped with its Super Aguri B-team running year-old equipment

Photo by: Glenn Dunbar/ Motorsport Images

How familiar to Mercedes fans last year. And this is no mere link worth considering over a warming beverage on a chilly January day. Just ask someone who worked on both cars.

"The start of 2022 definitely didn’t feel a lot better!" Andrew Shovlin, now Mercedes’ director of trackside engineering, then Button’s race engineer, tells Autosport of any comparison between Honda in 2007 and the Silver Arrows’ (mis)fortunes last year.

The RA107 disaster led to one of the great motorsport stories – one that really continues to this day and its latest chapter in Mercedes trying to recover from its 2022 humbling. With recently retired F1 sporting boss Ross Brawn brought out of his post-Ferrari sabbatical to lead Honda in 2008, the decision was taken to focus all efforts on the 2009 rules reset. Then came Honda’s shock withdrawal amid the global financial crisis, the Brawn GP salvation and Mercedes purchasing the team for 2010.

"At that point in 2007, the car was a long way off, the team’s capability was a long way off. The belief wasn’t there in the team – that we could ever get to a point where we’d win a championship" Andrew Shovlin

The foundations Brawn put in place were built on by Toto Wolff and Niki Lauda, with Mercedes becoming the all-conquering squad that has only just lost the constructors’ trophy it had held since 2014, back to Red Bull.

The season just gone was an almighty shock to Mercedes. Major F1 regulation changes often lead to a previously dominant squad losing its place in the pecking order, but it had successfully navigated the switch to ultra-high-downforce machines in 2017 and remained the team to beat. And Red Bull proved it could stay at the head of the pack from 2021-2022.

It did so without the porpoising and concept struggles that so plagued Mercedes. But the silver squad made an impressive recovery – to go from needing Red Bull or Ferrari cars to retire to get anywhere near the podium to winning on merit come the campaign’s conclusion (with a little help from Red Bull’s latest tyre calculations flop) in George Russell’s first F1 career victory.

The 2007 Brackley squad was playing a different game, of course – ending the year with just six points when in 2022 Mercedes did immediately score a podium. But, according to Shovlin, it simply wasn’t prepared to mount a recovery back then.

“No matter how optimistic you were, it was very hard to see how on earth we were going to turn that around and get back to fighting at the front,” he explains. “At that point in 2007, the car was a long way off, the team’s capability was a long way off. The belief wasn’t there in the team – that we could ever get to a point where we’d win a championship.

Many of the core team involved with Honda's 2007 car, including Button's race engineer Shovlin, are still involved in the team's current iteration as Mercedes today

Photo by: Lorenzo Bellanca/Motorsport Images

“The whole organisation had been [about putting] ‘plasters on plasters’ and fundamentally it hadn’t been built from the ground up in the right way. If you look at 2022, never for a minute did we think that we would not get back to fighting at the front.

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“Inherently, we all know that we’re here for one thing in this sport, which is to challenge for championships. And the big difference is that belief that, one way or another, we were going to beat these problems and get on top of the issues and get back to giving Red Bull and giving Ferrari a hard time.

“So, that’s the big difference, but also just the way the team works now [is altered]. Back in 2007, people were not owning responsibility for problems. Everyone was blaming another area. Now, with the way that we [operate], we were very quick to accept [with the W13] that we hadn’t done anything like a good enough job, [that] the responsibility for that lay on our own desks. Particularly with the senior technical team, we were very quick to accept responsibility for that and then look at plans for how we could solve it.

“Recovery from an issue like that is always a matter of time. But there’s bits of 2022 where you can be very disappointed with where we ended up, there’s other bits that you can look at it and be really proud of how people reacted, how hard they worked. Some of the steps that we made on the development process to try and understand these issues have been really impressive. And if you’re looking for a highlight of the year, I think it’s just looking how the team really worked to get itself back into a position of contention.”

Mercedes’ 2022 turnaround demonstrates how its efforts in improving team belief can make a tangible difference to a tough F1 campaign.

This is precisely what many paddock insiders had been getting at when they spoke of the leading teams from 2021 retaining certain advantages through the rules reset that would benefit them afresh at the start of F1’s new ground-effects era. The skill and knowledge of winning is ingrained. At Mercedes, it’s underpinned by the culture Wolff has honed – its belief in its personnel and how they have the confidence to know mistakes won’t lead to summary retribution. Trust goes both ways.

That’s worth remembering in the week that Fred Vasseur starts as Ferrari’s team principal. His new squad couldn’t do what Mercedes did in 2020 – arrest and address a problem. Or in the Scuderia and its drivers’ cases, fix several problems that undid a fine start.

Knowledge of how to win is ingrained in Mercedes, which has total confidence it can get back to the front

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Ferrari’s last drivers’ title, via Kimi Raikkonen, came in the 2007 Brazil finale where Honda mechanics had taped a lighter to the inside of Button’s cockpit in a symbolic nod to seeing the back of the RA107 – its barely-developed RA108 successor actually caught fire in the Interlagos finale parc ferme a year later. And 2008 was also Ferrari’s most recent constructors’ triumph. It can surely be said that the team now lacks the 'knowledge of winning’ factor that so boosted Mercedes even in its toughest moments last year.

In fact, Mercedes invested so much in unpicking the W13’s flaws and upgrading its design tools and processes in its bid to fix the porpoising and then ride issues last year, it grasped where it went wrong clearly. If it can take out the 'baked in' trapped potential thought to be the W13’s large floor concept for the W14, team insiders suggest it might be able to find 0.3-0.4s in one stroke. Not that things in F1 are ever so simple...

The Honda 2007 warning is greater for Ferrari as it embarks on its latest a new management era. It might be successful quickly with Vasseur – highly prized for his skills running a race operation and developing drivers – at its helm. But that seems less likely right now

But the Honda 2007 warning is greater for Ferrari as it embarks on its latest new management era. It might be successful quickly with Vasseur – highly prized for his skills running a race operation and developing drivers – at its helm. Management shake-ups can indeed alter trajectories.

Opinion: Why Vasseur has no excuses for Ferrari failure 

But that seems less likely right now looking back on so many lessons from F1’s history. And in that, the tale of 15 years of progress at Brackley suggests it might take Ferrari rather a while to be a dominating force once again. But at the same time, if it fosters the required culture steps, corrects errors and stays patient, it can get back to knowing winning.

Will Ferrari heed the lessons of Team Brackley as the Vasseur era begins?

Photo by: Ferrari