Mercedes: Team Thread

They ****ed it 2 years ago, and once they'd realised that, part way through last season, a decision had to be made. They aren't going to catch RBR before 26 and they know it. they can't use what worked before because the FIA have crippled the concept to slow them down. I think they told both drivers and Lewis decided to move to Ferrari and George has become lead driver. Of course they will still upgrade the car and work on it, but I think the vast majority of their wind-tunnel and financial budget will be on the parts that will improve performance on both cars.
The thing about being 5th is that, although you lose money, you gain wind-tunnel time going into a big rule change that will set the tone for the next 5 years.

 

The cost of doing that would be apocalyptic. its just the odd 30mil a year or so not available to do development?

 

My view is that I can find quotes from hamilton in championship winning years saying the car is hard to drive or a narrow window.

I beleive that 2026 represents an engine change but not a revolution, it has impacts but its still a hybrid and gives al lthe teams the opportunity to get "most power" and gain a clear advantage.

However it does not IMO represent a massive change in other regs, the lighter smaller car and some aero elements will have thier impacts but you could be following a design concept still IMO that could be seen as a logical progression from today.

The very best test ground to get ground effect done is 2024 race car. there is no other place to be to see how to get a car to really function with it.

 

Aero development for 2026 is still officially banned and i don't even think the full rules have even been published yet.

Mercedes may just not have any clue how to fix it.

 

I don’t believe they aren’t trying, if they’d truly decided to just focus their efforts on the future (leaving aside the fact that car development is banned for 2026 until 2025), why bother with all the expense and R&D to switch from the zero-pod, which has basically had no impact?

They obviously have correlation issues, they think the car is fast, but they can’t realise it. That’s a story we’ve heard for years with teams that are struggling - but it’s a bigger issue today because with the RRA, you can’t just throw test time at, as not only are you taking some of your potential tunnel/sim time from car development, but you can only spend a certain number of hours on anything - adding a third shift to experiment is not allowed.

The other thing is this team has never really struggled. They were great briefly as Brawn based on a solid design and one innovation, the team was gutted that year and bought by Merc. The core that now works at Mercedes has built back from there, came up with a pretty good car during the first RedBull era, added a mega engine with the best integration between chassis and PU and have been the best since then until these rules. They’ve never been dominant car makers though, even during their successful period the RedBull and Ferrari chassis at times were close behind, even if the overall packages never were across a whole season.

Lastly you have to question how bad they are really/how good should they be? Only three teams have won a (real) race under these rules - they are the least successful of those three and 5 have been regular podium contenders, so they are 3rd out of the leading 5, but perhaps progressing the least with Aston also being a bit up and down.

Engines are no longer a differentiator (unless you are Alpine)
RedBull have Newey/a great technical team and a significant driver advantage in Verstappen
Ferrari have a better driver line up and seem to be growing technically.
McLaren has a good driver lineup that’s only getting better and has made significant technical and infrastructure improvements
Aston has Alonso, and similar improvements on the car side to McLaren
What is the advantage that Merc has, because history counts for nothing? The last few years has been shuffling the pack technically, brain drain to other teams and moves in the driver market that haven’t moved them forward. Why should we expect them to be up with Ferrari, let alone RedBull?

 

This is a very good summary of the situation in my opinion

The change to E10 fuel and engine freeze in 2022 really nullified any PU advantage and frankly Red Bull chassis were getting better all the time with the upward curve being huge in 2021 as they went toe to toe at last (albeit with rule changes impacting Mercs floor edges I think), so when the engines converged you’ve got a battle between Newey who is educated in ground effect, and everyone else.

They had it good for a long time and their dominance was equally boring, especially in the years where they had a 80HP advantage over Renault and a stuttering Honda.

Now they have to realise how much that hurt Red Bull and McLaren and now they have to fight them on a more even keel, both of whom have taken their licks and come back humbler (McL at least!) and more determined. Throw in a Ferrari works team who will always be a threat and an Aston Martin team who will be mighty in two years time, and they are up against it!!

 

Given the resources and experience Merc have, they should be doing a far better than they are.

It's tough to combat the combined power of Newey and Verstappen, both of who are just sublime, but they should be really competing to be the best of the rest, which as of now they really aren't, and in reality have been only beating Ferrari due to Ferrari's own ineptitude.

They look lost in the direction of the car and seem unable to extract the best from the package they have developed and appear to lack the ability to correct any of its flaws.

It's early in the season and if any team could make a turn around from this position, it's Merc. But I certainly don't feel confident that they will. It's a bit of a disaster for them. Losing their marquee driver only dds to the air of a team on the decline.

 

They’ve definitely made mistakes, particularly - in my opinion - at a management level.
Moving Allison out of the technical director role and back into it isn’t a good look.
The driver moves since 2021 haven’t turned out well, and there were a significant number of people questioning them at the time.
The top three teams all had to lose people under the budget cap - if we’re talking about their experience being a help - then you have to say that RedBull and Ferrari managed that better and lost less good experience. Whether that’s the decisions they made or being slow to get a “partner team” like the others have - you’d level both of those at management.

Some elements of the “they should be doing better” is narrative driven, rather than fact in my opinion. Aston fell off a cliff last year and bungled their development, through the season after an excellent winter, they’ve not yet recovered back to their early 2021 levels. They have plenty of experience (much of it from RedBull and Merc in particular), but we don’t talk about them in the same way as we do Merc. Is there really a logical reason to suggest they shouldn’t be doing just as well - are we cutting them that much slack because they’re moving factory and Merc aren’t - I don’t think so. Similarly McLaren bungled the winter of 22/23, but we weren’t as harsh on them at the time.

 

I just think in terms of development we need ot think about it being a ever moving goalpost where others are just doing better or faster than a team.

Aston didn't fall off a cliff, they simply didn't develop fast enough and didn't have the pipeline. They still don't.

Mclaren clearly were well behind last season and made a massive leap and look to be continuing as a similar pace to the other teams around them so look static compared to ferrari or mercedes. (aka competitive)

Mercedes are not developing at the rate of ferrari who made a good leap late last year and have continued it over the winter. Mercedes seems stuck in a narrow window and are constantly fighting that so never doing enough drag and weight reductions to keep up as they are chasing the window.

Red bull is chasing high downforce track improvements and weight. They still have the best top speed and its not from horsepower. they are chasing details as their window of operation is massive. They don't look to have ogtten it right as this is now 2 races out of 3 we are hearing issues around braking.

 

I'm not sure what you mean here, because the bottom line is that they should be doing way better than they are. They have absolutely failed to produce in this era and I'm pretty sure they would admit that they should be doing better.

Even if they can't fight with the combo of Max and Newey, they should be looking to be the best of the rest and they're not even close atm.

 

To use your own words to illustrate what I am saying - why should they be best of the rest? Let’s just consider the case of them vs Ferrari. Similar budgets, similar infrastructure, Ferrari drivers - at least over the last two years - are better, Ferrari had a better strategy for meeting the cost cap and suffered less staff poaching. Where Ferrari have made changes to their team, they’ve stuck and resulted in improvements. Equally Ferrari started 2022 pretty even with RedBull and have fallen away, not yet making it back to the competitive level they came in to 2022 with, so there’s an argument they’ve squandered their initial position.

Maybe some of this is the subtlety of language - could (rather than should) Merc be doing better? You’d have to argue yes, but so could Aston or McLaren both of whom have been up and down or Ferrari who have not built on their initial competiveness. From a Merc perspective, you look at the decision to move Allison and then bring him back - at least one of those things must be a mistake? They’ve made several radical changes in technical direction, when their issue primarily seems to be one of correlation, given that - was it the right approach? If they’d made different driver choices, they could quite easily have 2 from Alonso, Leclerc, Norris and a stronger, current driver lineup, with more potential going forward, rather than being stuck with a single driver, they aren’t sure is really up to leading the team and having a real quandary as what to do next in this area.

Ultimately this rules cycle should have created at least a big 6 with Aston and McLaren developing to be part of it as their new infrastructure has come on line. Of the big 3, Ferrari should have been strongest coming into this rules cycle given they were able to concentrate on it in the prior year and in that context you have to say RedBull/Verstappen have clearly overachieved, Alpine have clearly underachieved and everyone else is roughly in an acceptable position relative to each other.

 

maybe redbull overachieved last year in terms of races won but I would agree over all. the two titles are 100% on merit and this one seems a lock too.

ferrari were never right season 1. they were quick some places but bouncing all over the place and unreliable too . they've backed off to get reliable and such but are still not really near redbull.

ally that to horrid strategies and that's why mercs finished 2nd last year.

I'd agree the driver lune up is better.

sadly imo Hamiltons massive wage is what hurts merc. I don't personally rate Russell. he makes really bad errors and is as likely to be the one weaving and brake testing others as he is to be the one caught out by it.