Mercedes has admitted that the team took too long to realise the approaches that shaped its previous success in Formula 1 didn’t work under the current regulations.
The German outfit entered the rules overhaul in 2022 as the side to beat having won an unprecedented eight consecutive Constructors’ titles between 2014 and 2021.
However, the marque encountered a tumultuous period upon the return to ground effect aero and managed a sole race win across the past two campaigns combined.
But Mercedes has now rebounded from a sluggish start to this season with an inconsistent W15 to emerge as a contender at the sharp end with successive victories.
Mercedes Technical Director James Allison has conceded that the team was too embedded in old working practices to realise that was holding it back under this era.
“The most significant thing that I would say we could point to inwards at ourselves and say as a criticism is that the way that we had found of working in the previous set of rules was very effective for the previous set of rules,” Allison told the F1 channel.
“I don’t just mean like the way we shape the front wing or the particular way that we handled the tyre squirt at the rear of the car.
“I mean that the way the key engineering groups interacted with one another in the team.
“So the aerodynamics with vehicle dynamics, vehicle dynamics with the track, and track with both of those two groups.
“The way that we were set up in the old world worked just fine. And not just fine, it worked for eight seasons on the trot, something no one has ever done before, it was pretty impressive.
“But we, to a large extent, carried on with that way of working together under different circumstances and were insufficiently self-critical to recognise that there were weaknesses inherent in that approach in the new world that didn’t matter in the old. We definitely paid a price for that.”
The root cause of Mercedes’ past troubles was traced back to the ‘zeropod’ concept and the bouncing that prevented it from extracting the W13’s peak performance.
“The cars are all so uncomfortably near to the ground in this set of rules that suspension and aerodynamics have to be really, really, really tightly bound up with one another,” he added.
“In the old world, they sort of needed to be cousins, but they didn’t need to be really, really properly embedded in each other’s worlds.
“Actually, it would have been inefficient in the old world to spend time fretting about the interaction of one group on the other in a particularly intense way,
because they were sort of orthogonal to each other to some extent. Now they are just completely in bed and the interaction has to be very tight.”
