Mercedes’ 2025 F1 car set to be ‘close cousin’ of W15 as first W16 details emerge

Mercedes say their 2025 F1 car will “likely be a close cousin” of their current challenger as they dropped the first design hints about the W16.

Speaking to select media including Crash.net at the Belgian Grand Prix, Mercedes’ head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin provided some early details about next year’s F1 challenger.

Shovlin also revealed the weaknesses Mercedes are still battling to cure with their current W15 challenger.

“The main remaining weaknesses in - in hot conditions at rear-limited circuits we’re not as good as the McLarens, or Max [Verstappen’s Red Bull],” Shovlin said in response to a question from Crash.net.

“We saw that in Budapest, we saw that in Austria. Our gap on racepace in Budapest was smaller. So I think we've made we've made progress there over the sequence of these recent races. If you looked at Silverstone though, we were competitive.

“I think the main weaknesses is that, but then everyone's trying to develop their cars. If you're not developing at a faster rate than the others, then you will quite quickly slip backwards.

“So there's always there's always going to be a focus just on how much development you can bring. And we can only see, you know, a month or six weeks into the future, because that's the that's the sort of horizon that you're working with in your wind tunnel.

“What we don't know is will we be able to keep delivering performance from the wind tunnel, from our vehicle dynamics group and mechanical design group.

“They're going to continue to be able to bring performance into the last part of the year - hopefully. We've got good ideas, but there's a lot of work to go through between having an idea and actually having physical parts that you can put on the car and make it go quicker.”

After a disappointing start to the 2024 season, Mercedes have enjoyed a competitive resurgence of late, winning three of the four races prior to the summer shutdown.

When asked by Crash.net if Mercedes plan to continue their aggressive development path into the second half of the campaign, Shovlin said: “We will continue at the factory to find as much performance as we can. So that that is what you're calling aggressive development. We’re flat out trying to find performance.

“Later on in the year, there will have to be discussions around is it this car? Or does it wait for the next car. The cost cap inevitably means that those discussions are a trade between performance gain and cost.

“We do want to be fighting at the front next year. So we're always going to make decisions that mean that that is a possibility. And then in terms of the wind tunnel, you've got the point at which you progressively shift resource from the current car to next year's car.

“I think probably every team has already started working on next year's car. But how rapidly you shift that resource over is a factor but teams may find that what works on this car works on next year’s anyway, or vice versa.

“So it’s not like the challenge we’ll have in 2026, where it’s a completely different beast.”

Shovlin admitted Mercedes are yet to make some important decisions about certain elements which will be carried over into 2025.

“We haven't made decisions yet on does the chassis stay the same? On does the gearbox stay the same?,” he explained.

“The reality is you probably can't change everything. We're at a stage now where we're trying to evaluate those to look for the best return for your spend in the cost cap.

“However, I think, aerodynamically, our car and most people's cars will be an evolution of what we have today. There’ll be significant changes on there but you won’t want to change the architecture of the car and take a big hit in the wind tunnel that you then have to recover. I don’t think many people will be doing that.”