No more major upgrades for Mercedes in the remainder of the season
On the back of a run of tough races during the European leg of the season, Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff admitted that the Brackley-based outfit will not bring any major aerodynamic upgrades to its W16.
Mercedes started the season with a string of strong performances, establishing themselves as the second quickest outfit in the early stages of 2025.
George Russell clinched third place at the season-opening Australian Grand Prix before repeating this result in the second race in China. Although he was unable to finish on the podium in Japan, he took a second place in Bahrain before clinching another third-place finish at Miami.
However, when the European leg of the season kicked off at Imola, Mercedes started to struggle for consistency as its car failed to deliver competitive race pace.
With an exceptional result at the Canadian Grand Prix that broke the wave of European races, Mercedes failed to finish on the podium in Imola, Monaco, Barcelona, Spielberg, Silverstone and Spa before Russell managed to clinch a third place at Budapest which hosted the last round before the summer break.
Speaking of Mercedes' plans for the remainder of the season, team boss Wolff has revealed that the Brackley-based outfit will not bring any major aerodynamic upgrades to its W16 in the remaining ten races of the current championship.
"This result and our overall performance here at the Hungaroring give us a direction for the rest of the season. As our focus turns to 2026, we won’t have any more major aerodynamic upgrades to bring to the track.
"Nevertheless, there are refinements we can make as we look to optimise the car we have. That will be useful as we look to end 2025 in a positive way and fight for second in the Constructors’ Championship over these final 10 races of the year," the Austrian noted.
Mercedes debuted the new suspension at Imola, but it returned to the older configuration for the next two races as it felt the upgrade needs to be tested at the factory. The upgraded suspension returned at the Canadian Grand Prix where George Russell took a dominant victory and Kimi Antonelli secured his first podium finish.
However, the German-British outfit endured a run of tough races again during the European leg of the season - Spielberg, Barcelona, Silverstone and Spa. which prompted them to revert to an older-spec suspension layout for the Hungarian Grand Prix to find out the exact cause of its technical issues.
Speaking of the difficulties with the upgraded suspension, Mercedes' Communication Director Bradley Lord explained: “I think we've seen across the first half of the season two pretty clear halves for us.
"A half where we've had consistent performance, the drivers have felt confident in the car and we've had a gap to the fastest cars. We've been in regular podium contention, that was sort of from Melbourne up until Miami.”
“From Imola to where we are now, we've seen a more inconsistent performance, which has had a higher peak in Canada. We've had obviously the race win and Kimi's first podium in Canada, which was a great highlight of the season so far.
"But also, on average, we've been further from the field and we've slipped from regular podium contention to more being top five, top six territory in our average race performance.”
