Why Mercedes was right to temper expectations and how it might recover

Mercedes is no stranger to tempering expectations ahead of a Formula 1 season, only to kick off the season in dominant fashion. But the team's 2022 car has legitimate concerns, leaving the Silver Arrows to pursue "damage limitation" at Bahrain. Here's why Mercedes was right to play its W13 down, and how it might find a return to form

Matt Kew Mar 22, 2022, 12:48 PM

Upd: Mar 22, 2022, 3:11 PM

Defending champion Max Verstappen certainly wasn’t buying it. Nor were quite a lot of Formula 1 fans when Mercedes came away from pre-season testing rubbishing its chances of fighting for victories at the start of grand prix racing’s second ground-effect generation.

A large part of that is down to the Silver Arrows having previously quelled expectations only to come up trumps. It was the team that cried ‘Wolff’. Last year was a case in point when new, clipped floor regulations were set to hurt the squad only for Lewis Hamilton to win the season opener at Sakhir to tee up a run to an eighth consecutive constructors’ title.

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Author Matt Kew

Matt Kew is Autosport’s F1 Editor, a role he has held since March 2022 following stints covering Formula E, Extreme E and the British Touring Car Championship.

Matt joined Autosport in 2018 to work predominantly on the magazine, but his relentless quoting of Alan Partridge meant office colleagues soon thought he would be better-suited to increased field work.

Needless to say, Matt had the last laugh when he won the Motorsport UK Young Journalist of the Year Award in 2019.

His interest in motorsport was sparked by regular trips to watch ASCAR crash around Rockingham’s banked oval.

Matt read politics and philosophy at the University of Sheffield - receiving first-class honours for his dissertation assessing the lack of female participation in top-tier motor racing.

He covered a wide variety of national race and rally meetings for Autosport as a freelancer before joining full-time. His best efforts to argue the merits of historic racing are undone by a questionable taste in music and James Bond actors.