The W16 is a far more consistent performer than the three cars that preceded it
The Mercedes Formula 1 team has enjoyed a solid start to the 2025 season, with George Russell leading the chase of McLaren at the first two races.
He was also quick at Suzuka but lost out after a mistake in qualifying left him fifth on the grid, and again at the chequered flag.
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Crucially the team seems finally to have moved on from the “diva” characteristics of the past three years.
The W13, W14, and W15 were always a little hard to predict, and they didn’t always respond to new parts or setup changes as expected, often leaving the team in firefighting mode.
In contrast the W16 is proving to be much more user-friendly. Technical director James Allison has confirmed that it is generally doing what it is supposed to do.
“It’s reasonably tractable,” he said when I asked him in Bahrain about the end of the diva era. “If you look at us every session of every track this year, we’ve been in pretty much the same place and it’s been wet, dry, it’s been cold tracks, warmer tracks, rough asphalt, smooth asphalt. It’s been there or thereabouts.
“I think it means we spend more of our time making it quicker, and less of our time scratching our heads…”
It’s a pity that Mercedes is finally hitting its stride in the fourth and final season of the current regulations, as Allison concedes.
“The frustration is merely that we that we’ve done a poor job over the last three years,” he said. “And have got a position where, having made a big step forward, we’re still not quick enough. But the regs are the regs are the regs. Get on and deal with them.”
Allison agrees that it’s been a solid start to the season, with a consistent performance.
“We come back from every race weekend having plotted where we think we sit,” he said. “Just looking at sector times in quali and in race, and the gaps in quali are very, pretty steady.
“We’ve been to three tracks now, and the gap has been pretty much three-tenths to McLaren, two, if we’re feeling optimistic, much less to a Red Bull, sometimes us in front, sometimes a whisker behind, and generally us having the legs on the Ferrari.
“In the race, the gap has been reasonably small, at the last track we were only 10 or 12 seconds behind at the end of the race, but in Melbourne, much larger, and that is much more about whether the tyres are happy in the window or not.
“Because over a single lap on new rubber, you can get most of what you need to from them, but if you haven’t got them happy over a longer run, then it will tell and you can see the gap opening up to half a second, three quarters of a second. And this track will be a real test of that, because of its very degrading nature.”
So where is Mercedes losing out to McLaren?
“I think that no one knows that,” said Allison. “If we did, it’d be very easy to copy, wouldn’t it?
“I think you could take a reasonable stab at saying that their surface temperatures at the rear of the car are likely to be lower than the other teams, because their advantage is found most when you’re at a rear-limited track and where rear tyre temperatures are governing your pace.
“But it’s never one thing, and they would have done a good job across the board.”
Allison isn’t too hung up about the specific deficit to McLaren, as the team has its hands full racing Red Bull and Ferrari as well.
“I think it’s been more like two-tenths in one or two places,” he said of the gap. “You can normally easily win championships with a two-tenths lead. However, we don’t just fight the people who are winning the race.
“We fight those nearest to us, and the gaps are way smaller than that there, and we have to make sure that we can continue to put points over the Ferrari to make sure that we can beat Max in the Red Bull, and hopefully get closer to the McLarens, who’ve done a fine job with their car this year.”
Like all the teams Mercedes faces the challenge of how to allocate resources between the 2025 and 2026 projects.
“I think any team that has got a bit of common sense will still be putting a good chunk of their effort towards the future,” said Allison. “Because the 2026 rules are such a tear-up from these ones, and these ones have just got 21 races left to go, and then they’re done, done.
“So we’re trying to push as much as we can onto the car in this sort of first quarter, third of the year, and maybe we’ll have some bits after that, but a lot of effort is going into the future.
“Happily even without changing the geometry of the car, there’s still quite a lot of lap time just in fine setup work.”
He added: “We are certainly planning to bring a reasonable raft of stuff for Imola. But there’s some things this weekend as well, nothing as flash as a floor or as outwardly visible as a floor, but things that we’re interested in finding out how they perform.”
Adam Cooper F1 