Mercedes is more confident of fighting for victories over the final ten rounds of the season after scrapping their revised rear suspension.
The team introduced a new suspension configuration at the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix at Imola back in May, but reverted to its original rear suspension for last weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix.
George Russell went on to take the final podium position in third after passing pole winner Charles Leclerc later in the race. Although team mate Andrea Kimi Antonelli was eliminated from Q2, he managed to take the final point on Sunday by rising up to tenth.
Mercedes’ trackside engineering director, Andrew Shovlin, admitted that the team had come to the conclusion that the revised rear suspension had ultimately been a misstep.
“If we make a new suspension, we’re doing it to make the car go quicker,” Shovlin said. “Clearly there’s something that wasn’t right.
“There’s areas where the drivers said the car is definitely better with that suspension, but when it came to stability in the fast corners – some of the corners where they’re having to carry a lot of speed on entry – they didn’t have confidence to push the car like they would like to. We always try to make things that improve the pace of the car – this didn’t.
“A lot of the work that has gone on now is to understand exactly what is it that has caused that problem. It’s not something that’s dead obvious, otherwise we wouldn’t have had that issue in the first place.”
Mercedes have struggled more than their rivals this season with their W16 being more sensitive to changes in track and ambient temperatures affecting balance. Shovlin says the team are focusing heavily on addressing this weakness for this year’s car and their 2026 car too.
“In the most simple sense, when the car is behaving in a nice, stable way, it’s quite easy to take a set up from one track, go to the next circuit, and know what you have to do in order to compensate the set up for different weather conditions or different track characteristics,” he explained. “The other thing that’s always nice is if you finish with a car on a Friday, and it’s working well, and you don’t change anything, it still works well on a Saturday.
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“Now, occasionally, you can get cars where, without doing anything, suddenly, if the wind changes a little bit, it changes all the handling characteristics. So what we’re looking for there is just a car that’s easy for the engineers to understand, for the drivers to understand, it’s predictable for the drivers, and its performance doesn’t swing wildly with small changes in ambient [temperature].
“The cars for 2026 are very, very different. But there will be a lot of elements, particularly around the learning on suspension, where we should be able to take lessons from this year into next year.”
Having won the Canadian Grand Prix with Russell in Montreal in June, Shovlin believes that Mercedes should have more chances to fight for victories over the final phase of the season following the summer break.
“Budapest showed that we’ve got a good car when we land it in the right place,” he said. “And then hopefully, there’ll be an opportunity to build on our tally of race wins.
“So we had a great time in Montreal. There’s other circuits that are a bit more like that coming up over the remaining ten races. And hopefully, we’ll have a few more highlights.”
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