Mercedes admitted that it took the team too long to realize that the approaches that shaped their previous success in Formula 1 did not work under the current regulations.
The German manufacturer entered the new era of 2022 rules as the team to beat after winning a record eight constructors’ titles in a row between 2014 and 2021.
However, Mercedes faced a tumultuous period after returning to ground effect, and managed to claim their only victory at the Brazilian GP in two seasons.
But the Silver Arrows have now recovered from a slow start to the current season with W15 to emerge as a contender at the top with two straight wins.
Mercedes technical director James Allison admitted the team was too entrenched in old working practices to realize it was holding them back in this era.
“The most significant thing I would say we can point to ourselves and say as a criticism is that the way we found work in the previous set of rules was very efficient for the previous set of rules,” Allison told F1 TV.
“I’m not just referring to the way we shape the front wing or the certain way we’ve dealt with tire wear on the rear of the car. I mean the way the key engineering groups communicated with each other in the team.”
“So, aerodynamics with car dynamics, car dynamics with track and track through both of these two groups.”
“The way we were set up in the old world worked well. And not only good, it ran for eight seasons on the trot, something no one had ever done before, it was pretty impressive.”
“But we, to a large extent, continued that way of working together under different circumstances and were not self-critical enough to recognize that there are weaknesses inherent in that approach in the new world that were not important in the old one. We definitely paid the price for that.”
The main cause of Mercedes’ past problems lies in the ‘zero sidewall’ concept and the bounce that prevented it from extracting top performance from the W13.
“All the cars are so uncomfortably close to the ground in this set of rules that the suspension and aerodynamics have to be very, very, very connected to each other,” he added.
“In the old world, they were supposed to be cousins in a way, but they weren’t supposed to be really, really properly embedded in each other’s worlds.”
“In fact, it would have been ineffective in the old world to spend time worrying about the interaction of one group with another in a particularly intensive way, because they were to some extent orthogonal to each other. Now they are completely in place and the interaction has to be very tight.”
