Mercedes planning “substantial” final F1 upgrade for US Grand Prix

James Allison has revealed Mercedes are planning a “fairly substantial set of new clothes” for their W15 F1 car at the next race in Austin.

Due to this year’s unusual scheduling, F1 has a four-week gap between Singapore and next month’s United States Grand Prix.

This second break period is giving all of the teams a significant amount of time to prepare new upgrades.

Mercedes are one of the teams which will bring a significant update to next month’s race at the Circuit of the Americas.

Prior to the summer shutdown, Mercedes won three of the last four races.

However, in recent rounds, their form has stuttered, particularly with Ferrari’s resurgence. 

Speaking during on the Mercedes YouTube channel in their Singapore debrief, Allison outlined the team’s plan ahead of COTA.

“Well, we’ll be trying to figure out how to mitigate what ailed us this weekend, how to figure out how to make the tyres run better on these sort of overheating circuits, and we’ll be also doing quite a lot of work to bring our last upgrade of the season together,” he said.

“We’ve got a fairly substantial set of new clothes for the car coming for Austin that we hope will give us a decent weekend there, so we’ve got to deliver all that and get ourselves ready for these last few races of the year.”

It seems Mercedes can’t get on top of making their car competitive in all situations.

In Singapore, they showed great one-lap pace with Lewis Hamilton securing third, while they struggled on race day.

During other race weekends, it’s usually the opposite with their best form coming on a Sunday.

“I think Sunday’s result was pretty difficult for the team, and Friday was signalling some of maybe what we might have expected by way of difficulty,” he added. “The anomaly really was Saturday, where we managed to get from a difficult Friday to a pretty creditable grid position.

“And there, have to give great credit to the team back at the factory, who really did help turn around a difficult Friday, put us much further up the grid than Friday might have suggested and give us a result that, while disappointing, was not disastrous as a consequence.

“I would say that probably the trade we made, although unwittingly, was that we improved the car for single lap, for qualifying, but it was quite a painful thing then on long runs.”