Mercedes

STARTS 293 | FIRST GP FRANCE 1954 | WINS 125 | POLES 137 | FASTEST LAPS 105 | 2023 2ND

After last year’s botched start to the season, Mercedes finally relented and gave up on its zeropod concept. The Brackley squad implemented a partial concept shift from May’s Monaco Grand Prix onwards, but what it really needed was an all-new chassis to truly realise the behavioural changes often requested by Lewis Hamilton and George Russell.

Fortunately for Hamilton and Russell, the long-awaited W15 seems much more poised and compliant than its devious predecessors. The two Britons no longer have a diva car, and it looked reasonably quick over long runs.

The 2024 car is probably the last roll of the dice for team boss Toto Wolff and Mercedes to regain race-winning competitiveness before the drastic 2026 rule changes. But it remains to be seen whether or not the W15 can realise those ambitions. Wolff rightly said Mercedes has a mountain to climb to catch Red Bull over the next two seasons, and that was before the Milton Keynes team stunned the paddock with a surprisingly different RB20 that seemed even more impressive than the car that won all but one of the 22 grands prix last year.

So, for a squad that finished second in the constructors’ table last year and looks unable to make that final step, what can success really look like in 2024? For starters, it will want to end the departing Hamilton’s 12-year tenure on a high with at least one more race victory after two unprecedented winless seasons. But perhaps more fundamental than that, Mercedes will also want to prove to itself that it hasn’t lost the knowhow and i