Mercedes make F1 form slide admission amid crunch meeting

Mercedes have admitted recent changes have made their 2025 F1 car worse.

The Silver Arrows began the 2025 season as one of McLaren’s nearest rivals, with George Russell claiming four podiums in the first six races to emerge as an outsider in the world championship battle.

But Mercedes’ performance has nosedived since scoring a 1-3 headed by Russell at the Canadian Grand Prix, while Kimi Antonelli has struggled for form during a brutal run of races.

After Russell could only finish a lonely fifth in last weekend’s Belgium Grand Prix, the Briton revealed Mercedes had called a “big” meeting at their Brackley factory to discuss what has gone wrong with their W16 challenger.

Mercedes technical director James Allison hinted that the team’s slide backwards in F1 2025’s pecking order is likely to be self-inflicted.

“It’s a guessing game, complete guessing game, when you try to say what maybe other teams have done to improve themselves,” Allison admitted in Mercedes’ latest post-race debrief video.

“But when you have a situation where seemingly everybody’s improved by the same amount, and you’ve just slipped backwards, more often than not when that happens, it’s because you have made yourself worse by that amount. It isn’t that everyone magically has put on the same size upgrade and crept up around you through that.

“Even if you ignore the lap times completely, you ignore the points that we are not getting anymore, like we did earlier in the year, and you just focus on what the drivers are telling us about the car, they’re telling us that the car of today, and of the last handful of races, is a car that is suffering from instability under braking in high speed, and turning in high speed, in a way that it wasn’t doing earlier in the year.

“Earlier in the year, it was a relatively easy car to set up, relatively easy to sort of pitch it up in qualifying for it to do OK. It was not enough to be championship competitive, but it was a whole sight easier to deal with than the one we have to do today.

“The downside of that, of course, is it’s dispiriting when we’ve made a lot of effort to improve the car, and we have not. The upside of it is that if you’ve done it yourself, which we have, it is comparatively easier to unpick that, because you just have to retrace your steps a bit, understand which of the steps you took that was in the wrong direction, and then move forward from there.

“It hurts, but it hurts less than, let’s say, if you launched a car with gremlins inside it, and you just had no idea what it was. If you’ve gone from a sort of relatively manageable beast to one that isn’t, and you know you only did X, Y, and Z in between, then you have a path backwards.”

Mercedes hope to sort issues in Hungary

Mercedes suspect their drivers’ struggles with rear instability on corner entry has been caused by recent developments made to the W16.

Allison said Mercedes are hopeful they can find a solution in time for this weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix - the final race before F1 enters a three-week mandatory shutdown in August.

“Our thoughts are to work as effectively as we can in investigating the things that we may have done that have made things worse, to hopefully pick off the most likely candidates and get that sorted in Hungary,” Allison added. 

“If we're fortunate, then to steady the ship a bit there and go into the summer break going, OK, that was no fun, but at least we can look forward to the second half of the year with that behind us. And if not those things, then we'll go to the next candidate at the next race and so on.”