‘Strange’ dominance will help Mercedes find answers with F1 2025 car

Mercedes believe their “strange” dominance of the Las Vegas Grand Prix could help them find answers to make their F1 2025 car more consistent.

After largely struggling for competitiveness since the summer break, Mercedes unexpectedly dominated in Las Vegas as George Russell headed home Lewis Hamilton for the team’s first 1-2 since Brazil 2022.

The win was Mercedes’ fourth of the season but their first since the Belgian Grand Prix at the end of July. Mercedes boss Toto Wolff suspects colder temperatures in Vegas partly explained their strong form.

“It's cold. I think that clearly you can correlate where we've been strong,” Wolff explained.

“We've been strong in Silverstone, we've been strong in Spa, and then here in Las Vegas. I think it's just keeping the car in its sweet spot, the tyres in the optimum window.

“It shows that the car can be very, very quick. We were two seconds quicker than our competition at times, when George was pushing, and for the rest of the day he was just managing his pace.”

He added: “When you break traction and it's hot, then you kind of swing out of the window all the time. And when you break traction here, that was actually helpful to keep the temperatures up at the time.

“So clearly, there is a pattern that some teams really love the cold and extract a lot of performance. And there are some teams that have been so strong when it was hot.

“Singapore, the McLarens for example, they dominated and they just controlled it in the way they wanted. So, yeah, it would be important to find a balance for next year.”

Wolff said it was “strange” Mercedes did not suffer from graining issues which hampered some of their rivals, notably Ferrari.

“We were capable of pushing whenever we wanted to. There was no graining period, neither on the medium, nor on the hard,” he said. “Charles attempted a few times to put pressure on George, which he defended great.

“I don't know what the outcome would have been of that, but he fell off [the cliff], Leclerc, after a few laps. He couldn't hold the pace, we didn't ever see the sign of graining nor degradation.”

Wolff says the data collected from Vegas will be crucial in helping Mercedes understand the current weaknesses of the W15.

“This one is a really important result,” he said. “You have fluctuations over the weekend, and then normally you can see we've been good here [in practice], then we've been not so good in that session.

“But here, every single session, we were ahead. So lots of good data that allow us to say at least we know what our sweet spot is, and this is where we need to be. It’s then trying to find out how we can hit that target more often.”