First the good news. The win promised by Mercedes’ redesign is coming.
And the bad? Weather interventions or acts of God apart, the chequered flag is unlikely to fall at Silverstone.
The aim this weekend is to be the fastest non-Max car. A small step for Formula One, a giant leap for Mercedes.
Beaten up as the F1 audience is by the dominance of Max Verstappen, life under the boot of Red Bull is not a world-ending experience for everyone. Mercedes technical director James Allison and the 1,000-plus cohort he leads at the team’s Brackley base operate in a different dimension and are engaged in a process that gives them life.
Allison has been brought back to the front line, swapping roles with Mike Elliott, who is back taking the longer view as chief technical officer. Allison is steeped in success, having been part of the Ferrari design team during the Michael Schumacher years and a senior figure in the imperious days of Lewis Hamilton’s hybrid dominance at Mercedes.
The mea culpa over with, Allison is foot to the floor to resurrect the House of Merc. He does not see failure as defeat, simply part of the journey.
“It is in the nature of sport. We try our best, and in any given season someone is that. Red Bull have done a terrific job and it’s up to the rest of us to sort our lives out and unseat them.
“That’s the whole point of it. There is a way of thinking about this that is positive and that is, when the Red Bull dam breaks, it’s going to be a brilliant rush for anyone bored of watching Max win.”
Allison’s enthusiasm is worth a tenth of a second to any design effort. And he is patient with questions from non-geeks who persist in framing Mercedes’ recent troubles as right or wrong. Well, almost.
“There is not a sloughing of the old, a ceremonial burning. Engineering is an iterative process where you gradually make a thing better over time by making neater and neater versions. The narrative that we did a new design was imposed on us by folk who are not in the hurly burly of engineering.
“Throughout the year the car changes. Some changes are visually obvious, in our case the sidepods. In some cases invisible to the average punter.
“The size of the change visually has almost no bearing on the size of the change in lap times. The narrative around this is stuff fills pages but is just not part of our world. The upgrades [introduced in Monaco] have produced a few tenths of a second.
“Very welcome but when you are trailing by closer than a second it is only ever going to move you closer to the front. We have to keep coming up with stuff like this faster than Red Bull.”
Working under the constraints of a budget cap limits the capacity for any team to make fundamental design shifts. The days of throwing $300m (£235m) budgets at blue sky concepts mid-season are no more, hence the long view at Mercedes.
“There are things we would love to change if we had a magic wand tomorrow but you have to wait for the generational shift because the lead times are too long and the cost too large. We have ambitions for next year that will involve changing things that are immutable mid-season [chassis, gearbox, cooling layouts etc].
“If we judge them right we have half a chance of making those new Netflix viewers excited. Red Bull will be doing just the same. Those that have been in this sport for more than five minutes will know this is always true.”
Time affords Allison the perspective required to balance the emotional ledger, reflecting on the 2004 season when Ferrari eviscerated the field to deliver Schumacher’s seventh drivers’ championship.
“One of the things that surprises is that sometimes your opponents don’t show up. You spend the winter fretting, thinking that you have done nothing very remarkable, that we might struggle, and for whatever reason the people who were giving you a hard time fall by the wayside.
“That is the period we are in at the moment. Us and Ferrari would be very self-critical that we have not got our arms around the regulations that arrived in 2022 with anything like the alacrity that Red Bull have.
“It would be fair to point the finger at ourselves and say ‘up your game’. There are no laws of physics stopping us from making a car as quick or if not quicker than theirs. It’s not magic.”
Allison is confident Mercedes have now made the equation. The correlation between theory and practice is entering that sweet spot of understanding, which fills Allison with sufficient confidence to talk about a moment when Mercedes might land a blow without attracting sideways glances.
“It’s fairly clear where our car hurts, and reasonably clear what to do about it. If the sport could just pop Red Bull in a cryo-suspension chamber for six months and we just carried on developing we would all be level.”
Fear not. Hope is at hand.
“It is completely realistic [to think] that we will win a race or two on merit towards the end of this season and, if we work well and strongly, that we show up next year bristling for the championship fight and in good shape for it. They are realistic goals, if not easy. Externally it looks like this will never end.
“Internally it does not feel like that in the slightest. As long as you know what good looks like, and as long as you have a tool that will predict the path of righteousness then that process will lead you to better performance. Everything is about process.”
Allison will be grateful for the corner turned. Relief, however, is only ever temporary.
“The Faustian pact I’ve made with this sport is, is that it is the most wonderfully exciting job. The downside is instead of stealing your soul it gives you lots of stressful dreams. Until I stop doing this I won’t get a relaxing night’s sleep.
“We think what we are doing is well-judged and correct but only time will tell. That is the frustratingly brilliant beauty of it, why the 1,000 or more of us here give far more of ourselves than is healthy. When all that planning turns into victories it is the best thing in the world, all that anxiety and not knowing gives way to the most amazing feeling.”
