Mercedes has escaped a vicious cycle with car development in 2025

Mercedes believes it is no longer stuck in a vicious cycle with its car development after an encouraging start to the 2025 Formula 1 season.

Mercedes has failed to mount a title challenge in the new ground-effect era of F1, having previously been the series’ dominant force between 2014-2021.

In each of the last three years, the German manufacturer started the season on the back foot, and any improvement it made on one side of the car over the course of the campaign compromised its performance in another area.

George Russell previously described the situation as “falling into a trap”, as Mercedes kept chasing speed from different parts of the car without making enough improvements to the overall package.

However, after scoring two podiums in the opening two rounds of the season, the Brackley-based squad is now confident that it has found a fix for the recurring problem in 2025.

“It is really quite like [Russell] describes, where we would get a bit fixated on one thing and then inadvertently introduce a new problem,” the team’s trackside engineer Andrew Shovlin said.

“Well, these regulations are quite difficult to make a car that’s nicely balanced over a range of circuits, a range of different corner speeds — and being in control of that through your development is the key. As you change one area, you can affect another.

“It was really just about having much tighter control on that loop. That meant the car that rolled out in Bahrain was what we were hoping to see.”

Mercedes’ 2024 campaign was plagued by inconsistency, with Russell and teammate Lewis Hamilton failing to race regularly at the front against Red Bull and McLaren.

The Brackley-based squad scored three victories in four races just before the summer break, plus a 1-2 finish at the Las Vegas GP later in the year. But there were also several occasions where the Brackley-based team failed to finish inside the top five.

The team eventually finished fourth in the constructors’ championship, more than 100 points adrift of third-placed Red Bull.

The W15 was also very sensitive to temperature, with its performance dropping in hotter conditions and improving when the track was cooler.

Shovlin explained that Mercedes spent a lot of time on the simulator during the off-season to build a car that is consistent across a wide variety of tracks.

“Where we’ve definitely done a better job is with the simulator work over the course of the winter, tracking the development of the car, making sure that the solutions we’re bringing to balance problems are appropriate for the balance problems we’re going to end up with,” he said.

“That whole process has been much more together than we’ve had in recent years. There were no surprises with winter testing.

“As we’re going through these early races, it’s encouraging that we’re seeing what we expect to see. As I said, there’s still work to do to catch McLaren, but that’ll just be the normal development work.”

Mercedes, which has signed rookie Andrea Kimi Antonelli to partner Russell this year, currently sits second in the constructors' championship behind runnaway leader McLaren.