Mercedes won’t fall into same short-term F1 traps

George Russell says his Mercedes Formula 1 team has taken great care to avoid falling into new traps in its development of the 2025 car.

Mercedes got out of bed on the wrong foot on the dawn of F1’s latest ground-effect era in 2022, a misstep it never truly managed to recover from.

First, there was the dreaded bouncing – or porpoising – that derailed much of 2022 and took nearly 18 months to solve. That pinch point masked further issues that prevented Russell and Lewis Hamilton from becoming regular challengers at the front.

Although there was a lot of progress in 2024 with a much improved car that yielded two race wins apiece, its struggle to be consistent across a variety of different circuits and conditions meant Mercedes still dropped to fourth behind McLaren, Ferrari and Red Bull.

Speaking at the F1 75 launch in London, Russell said the team had changed its approach this year by avoiding falling into the trap of applying short-term fixes for its problems without realising the knock-on effects those band-aids might have.

“I’m much more confident we’re not going to fall into a trap as we have them in the previous years,” said the Briton, who turned 27 at the weekend. “The last couple of years we’ve been so focused on solving the problem, we weren’t looking ahead to what future issues it would cause. It’s like you solve one thing and then it creates a new problem.

“So, we’ve been forward-thinking much more than we have done it in the past. That’s quite normal in the world, like aerodynamics; when you’re changing how it’s going to handle and make the front stronger, it’s going to take away from the rear. And if you go too far, that’s just as much as of a problem.

“I think there’s really been a thorough understanding of: ‘These are the fundamental changes we’re going to make. We think it’s going to do X, is that going to be a problem at these races? And if so, how are we going to drive around it?'”

One trap Russell and Mercedes aren’t falling into is making predictions over whether the steps Mercedes has taken will be enough to improve its fortunes in 2025, with squads having to make tough decisions on further developing their 2025 cars or pouring all their resources into the all-new 2026 rules. But he does feel the team has taken a more disciplined approach that has yielded a “reasonable step”.

“It’s going to be a significant change this year,” he added. “To be honest, we say 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 that we’ve made, and being more thorough than ever in terms of the simulator running, just to ensure we’re not going to fall into a new trap. So far, it’s a reasonable step. Obviously we 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.”