Formula 1’s overwhelming domination of Mercedes seemed endless. From 2014 to 2021, the third-placed star ruled best, winning 15 of 16 world championships. Mercedes has been struggling since the current ground effectiveness regulation package was introduced in 2022. What began as a temporary blip has become standard, and expectations have evaporated and teams get stuck in a loop of failure.
“Failure” is a relative term. Over the past three and a half seasons, Mercedes has won six Grand Prixes and placed second in the Constructors Championship without dropping out of the top four. That’s an enviable record for most people, but it’s not Mercedes. Now, expectations are rising again thanks to a major regulatory overhaul in 2026, thanks to a major impact on both the power units. Mercedes tips come back to the top. Can the question be done?
The argument is logical enough. First, Mercedes is a fully integrated work team, and such entities always have advantages in terms of performance potential, even if today’s rules narrow the conceptual gap between the factory and the customer team, taking into account the requirements of identical hardware and operational parameters. Second, resetting the rules reduces the reliance on underfloor aeros that Mercedes has never mastered completely, despite it being an exaggeration to characterize as a ground-effective floor. As technical director James Allison said earlier this year, “Because they are step plane cars, Venturi ground vehicles don’t have as strong aerodynamic seals as the cars of the past few years have.” Third, when the F1 last introduced a brand new power unit package in 2014, Mercedes attacked it. Fourth, there’s a tweet in the paddock that Mercedes is in a good location with an engine development program. Such whispers are vague, but there are mild indicators of hitting a target, and at least they don’t seem to get into trouble.
Because Chersay is not horsepower, it is impossible to assess the competitiveness of the power supply unit until the car hits the truck next year. It’s also surprising given that if Mercedes could replicate the scale of the benefits it had in 2014, some of the conditions that allow it to change. Brixworth’s Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrain remains a horrifying organization led by Highwell Thomas, who replaced Andy Cowell (now the Aston Martin Team Principal) in mid-2020. The “Brain Srain” effect of rival poaching staff, particularly the Red Bull Powertrains program, which employs the first in-house design of next year, is often cited as evidence that it is a weakened organization, but it rarely supports it. Instead, the rivals are inevitably catching up.
Importantly, while Mercedes stole the opposition’s march by committing to development earlier than its rivals ahead of its rivals, it is now much more difficult to get a single-cylinder test engine up and running long before it reached a final agreement on regulations. The annual PU development cost cap, audited annually, coupled with the current hardware freeze that was instigated in 2021, means that all manufacturers should have made similar investments in roughly the same timeline. Mercedes PUs could emerge as market leaders in 2026, but the new regulatory challenges that aim to make the V6 50/50 split (actual split) mean there’s plenty of surprise.
For discussion, let’s say the Mercedes PU is the best with the assumption advantage of 1/10 seconds per lap over the opposition. They then have to beat the McLaren, Williams and Alpine customer teams. It should have a more comfortable advantage over Alpine, but given Williams’s principal refers to 2028, it’s probably too early to expect Williams to do his best, but McLaren is clearly a tough opponent as everything is here for the first time to meet that possibility. While the team’s principal, Toto Wolf, has sincerely said that even behind the rival cars, he takes pride in the success of the Mercedes Power Unit’s winning championship, there is no doubt that everyone at Mercedes Blackley Base in the UK will appear at McLaren. That’s the important question hanging from Mercedes. Can you produce a car that has won the title?
Mercedes nailed the final major regulatory change for F1 in 2014, but this time things are a little different. Charles Coates/Getty Images
Under current regulations, the answer is no. The Mercedes W16 is a decent machine, but it is not something you can regularly fight for victory. In favorable conditions such as Canada, the combination of cool temperatures, short corners and straight brakes allowed George Russell to win from pole position. McLaren certainly wasn’t achieved that weekend, but Mercedes won by merit. Mercedes may win again this year. Las Vegas is the most likely venue in November, but it is second in the Constructors Championship, but is actually the third Red Bull behind Red Bull, effectively one team. Since its launch in 2022, Mercedes has been constantly troubleshooting, and whenever one issue is cured, another pops up. It’s a developmental bang game that has proven to have been extremely frustrating and repeatedly led to false dawn. The 2022 era, when the car bouncing back, has long been behind, but this year has been difficult. It was exemplified by the introduction of a rear suspension upgrade in Imola, which was permanently dropped after Hungary. Russell did this in Montreal, but its success actually misunderstood the team. It simply made the rear end too unstable, leading to difficulties for Russell and a nightmare run for his rookie teammate, Kimi Antoneri. It was on top of the trouble at higher temperatures, given the car overmachining the rear tires.
This was the first Mercedes story since 2022. A huge amount of work has been done to understand that weaknesses and improvements have been made to its design and simulation tools, but still, it cannot be perfectly matched with McLaren. There are always some ghosts in the machine, and the physics quirks that confused it, blowing the ship off the course every time it appears to have a proper course set up. The team never fully grasped these ground-effect vehicles or fully tackled the challenge of cars that had to drive slow, hard cars. Last year it seemed like a breakthrough was made with the flexibility of the front wing that fixed it, but that was only a partial solution.
“From our perspective, it wasn’t very enjoyable,” said Azerbaijan’s head of trackside engineering Andrew Shoblin earlier this month in the regulatory cycle. “It was an interesting engineering challenge. There are many areas where the way we developed aerodynamic cars was insufficient to capture the subtlety of these rules. The flow under the car is much more complicated and dynamic than before.
“If we’re going to get the car to be very stiff and very low on the ground. We’ve developed it into an acceptable solution, but in reality, these cars never have a good ride. You could be much softer in the spring.
The good news is that next year’s cars won’t be driving that low. Realistically, it starts midway between the current “low rider” machine and the high-lake machine used in most grids in 2021. Interestingly, Mercedes was one of the last holdouts when it came to operating low cars during that period. Still, it was important despite them being a staircase car. Perhaps the need to experiment so much in that field before 2022 meant it was in the red to understand the science underlying both design and tools? This is one of the intangible questions that can define the performance of an F1 car.
It remains to be seen whether Mercedes will be able to produce top cars again in 2026, and it is simply naive to argue that the new regulations mean a completely new start. The performance of an F1 car is always a manifestation of the total of the people on the team, the tools, the knowledge, the decisions, and the myriad other factors that contribute to its pace. That’s why we’re putting a rigorous test of how much Mercedes has learned next year’s car. At George Russell, there are drivers operating at high levels that are not ready to compete for the World Championships.
However, it is the first fight since 2022 that proves to be a Mercedes magic bullet. It’s counterintuitive, but when it comes to F1 car design, some of the biggest successes are rooted in failure. Over the years, Mercedes has turned every stone over and over again to understand the problem, but that knowledge and understanding is not in vain. That’s not a guarantee of success next year. Because the weaknesses that have led to problems over the past four seasons could be the same as creating difficulties with the 2026 car. That should mean there are the answers needed to make a ’26 car successful, but recent history has disrupt such expectations and the opportunity for next year could also be wasted, as Mercedes has been frustrated at every stage. That will simultaneously make next year a major opportunity for Mercedes and its biggest test.