Why the badly-timed Mercedes F1 struggles are tough to overcome

Is this why he did it? Beyond the sheer allure of Ferrari and/or the sting of a 1+1 2023 contract extension revealing the timeline for Toto Wolff’s driver succession plan, did Lewis Hamilton look at Mercedes’ initial design for its 2024 challenger, the W15, and conclude it wasn’t good enough to keep him around?  

This is now Mercedes’ predicament. Three times in a row at the start of this regulatory era, it has failed to produce a class-leading car in keeping with the iron-clad pedigree it established with seven drivers’ and eight constructors’ crowns between 2014 and 2021. And now Hamilton – its undisputed seven-pointed star – is departing. Possibly, disillusioned.

In the weeks that followed the shock announcement of
his Ferrari deal from 2025 onwards, Hamilton talked up his love for the red team. But, impressively, at the same time he did a fine job defending and respecting his soon-to-be former squad, as you would expect of a sports star so versed in
public message massaging.

That latter position has held. That’s even as he’s traversed the test and season-opening events in Bahrain, then sampled the W15 through the differing challenges of Jeddah and Australia and their high-speed turns following Bahrain’s point-and-squirt, tyre-stressing nature. Then there was Suzuka and its all-over test of an F1 car,
where Red Bull inevitably dominated. Heading to Monaco, following trips to Miami and Imola, Mercedes had still yet to score a Grand Prix podium in 2024, although Hamilton was second in the China sprint.

The Silver/Black Arrows team can be said to be in a worse position, year-on-year, versus 2023. Arriving to Monaco last year, it sat third in the constructors’ championship behind Red Bull and Aston Martin. This time around, even with Aston dropping dramatically, Mercedes
is clearly behind Ferrari in Red Bull’s wake and behind the much-improved McLaren too.

“You look at last year [in Melbourne, where Ferrari won in 2024’s visit amid Red Bull’s various damage issues], where Leclerc crashed out and Sainz was fourth on the road, McLaren were 17th, 18th or 19th and now they’re 40 seconds ahead of us,” Wolff said after round three.

“On one side, I want to punch myself on the nose. On the other, it’s a testimony that when you get things right, you
can turn it around pretty quickly.”

Mercedes has been overhauled by McLaren and lost ground to Ferrari after beating it to second in the constructors' standings last

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Mixed fortunes

Wolff’s frustration at Mercedes’ 2024 quandary – that it hasn’t altered its results trajectory –  is as passionately put as ever. As the team’s co-owner, he is intrinsically tied to its fortunes.

Not that all of them have been bad. To a high-finance investor – declared a billionaire by Forbes magazine last
year – the news Mercedes has become the first F1 team to exceed a turnover of £500 million, per its latest published accounts, will have been most welcome. Indeed, a Mercedes declaration in the filings included the line “in July [2023], Forbes estimated the value of the team to be $3.8 billion”.
All its successes really are Wolff’s too.

But he remains massively competitive – his desire for Mercedes to return to its previous position is abundantly clear. And going back to Mercedes’ accounts underpins this desire: its profits fell from £89.7m declared in 2022, to £83.8 million last year.

"Most weekends we have a period in the weekend where we’re feeling confident about the car but then, in the paying sessions, in qualifying and the race, that slips through our fingers"
James Allison

That has much to do with complex costs and tax changes in 2023, but the fall will still have been felt. Plus, there’s how the team stated its “share of television coverage showed a small decline to 14.7% for 2023, reflecting the lower number
of podium finishes the team enjoyed versus 2022”.

Through the season’s early phase, Mercedes failed to get anywhere near the podium again. But what was perhaps more important than the absence of headline results, is how its explanations for its struggles varied through each round.
Such a miscellany just doesn’t bode well for future success.

In Bahrain testing, the focus was on how Mercedes’ decision to move to a pushrod rear suspension for 2024 had created
a package that was “nicer to drive than last year’s car”, according to George Russell. Hamilton said the W15
was “a great platform to build on,” while acknowledging
it wasn’t a Red Bull-beater.

Come the Bahrain race weekend and Russell’s revelation that “the one area we need to continue to work on is probably the bouncing we’re seeing” stirred memories of the porpoising issue that plagued the team’s first ground-effect car.

The W15 was visibly one of the worst offenders for braking oscillation when viewed trackside in Bahrain. But what was really holding the team back was how, when the downforce packed on through faster corners, the car – like its W13 and W14 predecessors – still seemed to be suddenly shedding downforce, robbing its drivers of pace and confidence.

It has been apparent from early in the season that the W15 has not been the step forward Mercedes hoped for

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

Hamilton said that was “still there” in Jeddah qualifying, which he felt made it “very, very, very difficult to push”. And so, Mercedes’ focus turned to how in the high-speed turns so prevalent in the opening sector at that street track it was “losing all the lap time”, per Wolff. He called this a “fundamental thing” where the engineers “believe that the speed should be there” and “measure the downforce but
we don’t find it in lap time”.

“It was like I was in a different category when I was
going through the high-speed with the other guys around
me,” Hamilton added.

Correlation not causation

In Australia, Wolff was again describing how “fundamentally, whatever we see in the tunnel doesn’t correlate with what’s happening on the track”. Questions over wind tunnel-to-track correlation are a red flag to a bull for genius technical minds such as Mercedes’ James Allison, but it was after Melbourne where he entered another twist in the story of the W15’s foibles.

“We are starting to see a pattern emerge that most weekends we have a period in the weekend where we’re feeling confident about the car but then, in the paying sessions, in qualifying and the race, that slips through our fingers,” Mercedes’ technical director said of how five times it finished among the top three in (dry) practice sessions through the first four rounds but only once (in Bahrain) registered a top three result in qualifying.

“If we were trying to draw that pattern together then probably the strongest correlation that we can make at the moment is that our competitiveness drops when the track is warm, when the day is at its warmest, and therefore the tyre temperatures rise with those of the track.”

In Japan Mercedes’ effort to help its drivers keep the rubber on each axle better in the operating ‘windows’ – specifically improved balancing with cooler rear tyres via set-up – seemed to pay off. Hamilton called Mercedes’ package in “a sweeter spot” and “the nicest it’s felt over the last three years”.

But still, the results failed to materialise. In qualifying at Suzuka, Hamilton was on the wrong side of a 0.1s split that covered fourth-eighth. Russell insisted that Mercedes’ weakness remained the high-speed corners and so “when you get to qualifying, you take the fuel out, the corners are becoming faster and faster and faster [and] the pace naturally sort of goes away from us a bit in those corners”.

After that event, Wolff returned to the correlation theory. Except this time there was a new dimension to dissect.

Mercedes has often found that performance slips away at the crucial moment in the weekend

Photo by: Steve Etherington / Motorsport Images

“We’re measuring downforce with sensors and pressure tabs and it’s saying to us that we have 70 points more downforce in a particular corner in Melbourne than we had last year,” he said. “But, on the lap time, it is not one kilometre per hour faster. It doesn’t make any sense. So, where’s the limitation?”

The thinking has therefore turned from Mercedes’ 2024 problem being rooted in the W15’s aerodynamics towards its mechanical ride. Again, how Red Bull’s fleet of ground-effect cars have succeeded through understanding this critical area is well known. For Mercedes, that rear suspension change means it has new data to understand. There could well be additional gains for it to find, but this is work Red Bull doesn’t have to do.

If the budget cap fits

F1’s leading team provides an important contrast. Its smooth run-through testing and the opening phase of the season – Melbourne issues aside – is easily explained by its 2022 and 2023 prowess. But at Suzuka, it added a notable cooling and floor upgrade and yet, according to Red Bull’s paddock firebrand Helmut Marko, these worked from “the first outing” in FP1.

The cost cap has inflated F1 team worth and made them financially healthier, but the team can’t spend its way back into competitiveness

It’s also long been clear how Red Bull understanding and nailing these design rules gave it an advantage that’s carrying it through, even as rivals such as Ferrari and McLaren – but notably not Mercedes – close. But Mercedes can’t make more dramatic gains, as in the past, for one key reason.

“Under the cost cap regulations, if you start off on the wrong foot, it’s perhaps more difficult to reverse your way out of that than it was when spending was less limited,” says Red Bull’s soon-to-depart design legend Adrian Newey. “So, ironically, the regulations that were designed to kind of make things closer arguably had the opposite effect, as rule changes often do.”

It’s worth pondering how the cost cap has inflated F1 team's worth and made them financially healthier – in the context of Mercedes’ financial results and how those extend to Wolff. But the team can’t spend its way back into competitiveness.

The 2026 rules reset, with new engines as well as new chassis, is a big opportunity for Mercedes to reclaim its crown. But, given all the varied pain it’s now enduring with the W15, soon to no longer be Hamilton’s problem, Wolff is determined not to capitulate in the current era.

“We are Mercedes,” he said in Japan. “We cannot completely abandon the current regulations and continue to perform on the level we’re at. That’s not the ambition of the brand.”

Mercedes has lost Hamilton to Ferrari for next year, but is determined not to give up on the current era

Photo by: Sam Bloxham / Motorsport Images