The title-winning squad has a new design concept but has started the season poorly for a third year in a row. So how soon can it really get back to challenging Red Bull?
ALEX KALINAUCKAS
We’ve been here before. On 30 March 2023, the front cover of this magazine asked: ‘What next for Mercedes?’ Almost a year earlier, on 7 April 2022, the line was essentially the same, albeit with some added Toto Wolff fury – ‘“Totally unacceptable” – what’s gone wrong at Mercedes’. Arguably, this rather niche trend encompasses 2021 too, when on 15 April that year we were explaining ‘What Mercedes must do to fix the W12’ at the start of the squad’s titanic battle with Red Bull for that year’s world titles.
But those 2022 and 2023 features, and now this one, follow the second round of a new Formula 1 season. Mercedes was comprehensively defeated in the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix earlier this month, not just by the dominant Red Bull team but by its regular rivals in the also-ran race. This isn’t a convenient case of deja vu. It’s real repetition and time to ask: what has gone wrong with Mercedes this time?
Trouble at the front of the F1 field is, of course, rather relative. Mercedes is not facing Alpine levels of awfulness. And, in clinching second in the 2023 constructors’ championship ahead of Ferrari, it has a results pedigree that most other teams would hurriedly snap up.
But for a team that secured an unprecedented run of title success – those seven drivers’ and eight constructors’ titles from 2014-21 – second really isn’t good enough. And Mercedes has such an array of driving and engineering talent, it’s understandable that F1 observers expect a lot from what remains an illustrious squad.
Mercedes’ start to 2024 might also be looking rather different had it not got its cooling calculations wrong in the Bahrain season opener. Sure, Ferrari was hobbled by its brake problems too but, when George Russell blasted past Charles Leclerc to run adrift of Max Verstappen on lap three of that race, Mercedes’ potential looked rather different.
It had also looked strong on one-lap pace at a track where finding and maintaining the tyre performance window is devilishly tricky. But then the cooling issue aided Ferrari’s resurgence past Russell, and stopped Lewis Hamilton from showing anything of note after his poor qualifying. Then, in Jeddah, Mercedes showed little across the weekend. And what it did see, it didn’t like. But it insists that the W15 is a step f
