The real story behind Mercedes' turnaround

Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has always lived off the mantra that the day his rivals should fear the most, are those when his team has suffered pain.

Last year, for example, he famously used Mercedes' defeat at the Belgian Grand Prix as a focal point for his team to dig deeper and push towards what would be its fifth straight championship double.

It appears we've had a similar trigger point at the start of 2019 too. Mercedes was able to recover from a difficult first test - dramatically labelled by some as a 'crisis' - to unleash a vastly improved car for the second test that it was able to tune and turn into a surprise winner in Australia. The narrative is not quite that simple, though.

In a year in which there has been a fair bit of pre-season bluffing, how events were playing out in public was very different from how Mercedes perceived things itself.

Don't imagine for a moment that the vastly upgraded Mercedes that appeared at the second test was in any way a response to what had happened in the first week.

There is no way an F1 team would be able to realise the trouble it was in, get the designers hard at work in coming up with new parts, windtunnel test them, manufacture them and then fly them out ready to run in a matter of days.

F1 may be a world that lives on the cutting edge of technology, but things are not able to roll out that quickly.

The kind of revamp that Mercedes unleashed at the second test is something that takes weeks, if not months, to come up with. Instead, it was a deliberate parallel project of a 'launch' spec for week one and a totally different 'race one' spec to follow.

Mercedes pushed the button in November on a basic launch-spec car that it could build, prepare and know would be ready for the first test.

Downforce improvements were being found hand-over-fist over the winter, and designers were focused on coming up with the revamped package that would appear at the second test.

Negativity isn't actually a bad thing for any team. After all, Wolff knows that his biggest challenge after multiple world championships is stopping complacency stepping in

This project would have had nearly two more months of windtunnel time for performance improvements, so it was always going to be much better than the launch spec.

Of course, the outside world - and especially rival teams - had no clue this plan was in place when the W10 first hit the track at Barcelona.

In fact, Mercedes was clever in hinting that its basic 'launch-spec' car could hold some secrets, as it teased camouflage images in the week before it was unveiled to suggest it needed to keep things hidden.

The Mercedes car certainly didn't look quick in the first week of testing, with its drivers talking about handling problems and it lacking balance. This was in contrast to Ferrari, which appeared to have bolted out of the blocks.

Mercedes' struggles were seized upon as a sign that it had perhaps not got things right. This feeling was further amplified by the fact that it had adopted a different front wing philosophy to Ferrari.

From the viewpoint that the testing-spec car was not its real 2019 challenger, we now have to view it as false that Mercedes was in real trouble in week one.

The updated version of the W10 - which it has since emerged involved changes to every single aerodynamic surface of the car - was what we ideally would have judged Mercedes' pre-season capabilities on.

But that was made even more difficult by Mercedes sticking to a rigid high-fuel, baseline set-up testing programme in the early running of its new-spec car.

The team needed to do that because of the varied aero philosophies that had appeared - and to be sure that the week one woe was simply down to the launch-spec aero rather than inherent car issues.

It was only on the last day of running that Mercedes finally took some fuel out to see what its car could really do - and it largely matched Ferrari's speed.

Against the backdrop of the difficult first test, though, that late strong pace was not enough to change perceptions that Mercedes was on the back foot - with even the team admitting it was unsure where it stood.

As Wolff said: "When we saw the various aerodynamic concepts hit the road in Barcelona, and us not having the pace, we just gave it all and tried to understand and not be too distracted by other people's lap time.

"I think I must give all due credit to Loic [Serra] and his team, and Andrew Shovlin's team, that we continued to follow our programme during the tests. And back-to-back testing - baseline, a new component, baseline, set-up change, baseline, set-up change. And finally, towards the end of the second test, things came together, and the drivers liked the car more."

Perhaps one of the most significant impacts of Mercedes' winter was that it really did leave the team with some uncertainty. It genuinely wasn't totally sure its car was quick enough or had the right aero concept.

"When there is nothing more to conquer, you fall into complacency, then empires disintegrate" Wolff on Roman Empire comparisons

But such negativity isn't actually a bad thing for any team. After all, Wolff knows that his biggest challenge after multiple world championships is stopping complacency stepping in.

Some doubts about the job that had been done will have acted as a motivating force in getting the team to dig deeper and work harder to ensure it was getting the most from the W10 in Melbourne.

In a final factory briefing to staff before the team left for Australia, Wolff was clear that everyone needed to knuckle down for a fight.

"This year is not going to be about who comes out of the blocks the quickest," he told them. "This year will be about the fittest, the ones that adapt the best to these new tyres and to these new regulations.

"It's 39 weeks until the end of the season. And whatever happens in Melbourne, whatever happens in Bahrain and China, is just the beginning of the season.

"We have all it needs to do it again. There are challenges but we are not taking anything for granted, so let's rock and roll and kick it off."

In the end, the negatives of testing were turned into positives for the start of the campaign. It was the sort of brilliant turnaround in which wars are won.

Ahead of Melbourne, Wolff told German newspaper Sueddeutche Zeitung about how the lessons of the collapse of the Roman Empire had helped drive his management philosophy - with the team bringing in a military strategist to help offer advice on how not to fall into the complacency trap.

Speaking about the reasons for the end of the Roman Empire, Wolff said: "There are a few theories - some say because the Romans were full and perished from their decadence. Or because new and annoying enemies stood at the borders. The migration of peoples.

"Also, the Romans ran out of equal enemies. Then they became careless. Decadence and arrogance can be consequences. The Romans no longer prioritised. There was nothing more to conquer. And when there is nothing more to conquer, you fall into complacency, then empires disintegrate.

"Also because the people deal with themselves, it develops internally into trench warfare. The fall of the Roman Empire is an example that we have intensively discussed."

For now, Mercedes has avoided the decadence and arrogance that cost the Romans so badly. It knows it has a fight on its hands, it knows the enemies (Ferrari in particular) are regrouping.

But in some ways, it has hit the start of 2019 even stronger thanks to those troubled first days with the W10.