Explained: Key changes to Mercedes W16 F1 2025 car to "remedy" past flaws

Mercedes have made fundamental changes to their 2025 F1 car in a bid to iron out the inconsistencies which have afflicted their recent performance.

All of the Silver Arrows ground-effect cars since new refutations were introduced in 2022 have been dogged by persistent troubles. The W13 was plagued by porpoising and bouncing while the W14 suffered from rear-end handling instabilities.

Mercedes changed design concept for 2024 but despite winning four races, their W15 challenger still proved to be temperamental and suffered from performance fluctuations which left both drivers and the team baffled.

Mercedes explain changes to W16

With the W16, Mercedes say they have changed “every aerodynamic surface” of the car for the upcoming 2025 season.

The W16 features a new front suspension and further changes under the skin to “remedy” some of the challenging characteristics of its predecessor, the team have explained.

“Being the fourth year of these regulations on the chassis side, the cars are in the more mature phase,” Mercedes technical director James Allison said.

“Big gains in lap time are harder to come by but we’ve been concentrating on making improvements in the areas that held us back last year.

“Our primary focus has been on dialling out the W15’s slight reluctance to turn in slow corners, along with the imbalance in tyre temperatures that made the car inconsistent from session to session.

“We are pleased with our progress over the winter and we’re looking forward to finding out where we stack up against everyone else.”

With stable engine regulations in place for 2025 before a major rules reset in 2026, Mercedes have placed much of their focus on finding reliability improvements.

“We have been looking at reliability updates, and some calibration upgrades, to deliver robustness, squeeze the last little bits of performance out of the Power Unit and give ourselves the best opportunity this season,” power unit boss Hywel Thomas added.

“We’ve made good progress and hopefully that can add performance on track.”

George Russell confident Mercedes won’t ‘fall into a trap’

George Russell, who has become the team’s de facto team leader following Lewis Hamilton’s move to Ferrari, told media including Crash.net at last week’s F1 season launch event that he is confident Mercedes are “not going to fall into a trap” with their new car.

“I think it’s going to be a significant change this year, to be honest,” he explained.

“Every year we’ve uncovered a problem, we’ve solved it and it’s created a new one.

“We’ve probably been a lot more disciplined with every change we’ve made. We’ve been more thorough than ever in terms of the simulator running, just to ensure that we’re not going to fall into a new trap.

“And so far it’s a reasonable step. Obviously, you have no idea what everyone else is doing and it’s going to be quite an interesting season with how people deploy the resource between 2025 and 2026.”

Russell and new teammate Kimi Antonelli will drive the W16 for the first time during a filming day in Bahrain on Tuesday.