(Motorsport-Total.com) – For the first time since the 2021 Formula 1 season, Mercedes is leading both world championships in the premier class again this year. After the Silver Arrows remained titleless throughout the entire ground-effect era between 2022 and 2025, the world championship trophy could finally return to Brackley in 2026.
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“A tremendous amount of work was invested to find out where the performance gaps were, what improvements we needed in the area of simulation, how we could predict performance, and similar things,” explains deputy team principal Bradley Lord.
Although Mercedes was occasionally capable of winning in the past four seasons, they never managed to build a car during this period that could regularly compete for victories. Therefore, the Silver Arrows were never a genuine title contender in all those years.
Mercedes has regained exactly this consistency with the new regulations in 2026 and the W17. Of the eleven races up to the summer break, the team won eight, and at all eleven Grands Prix, they always brought at least one driver onto the podium.
“We tried to take many of these insights [from the ground-effect era] into account when preparing for these regulations,” emphasizes Lord. One major problem was, among other things, that the car behaved very differently on the track at the start of the new regulations compared to the simulations.
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Mercedes was determined to avoid this mistake in 2026. “I think one of our strengths was that from the very beginning we had a very, very close collaboration between the chassis and engine teams,” says the deputy team principal.
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They managed to “develop tools within the capabilities of the chassis team that allowed us to simulate the behavior of the cars very well and to recognize the fundamental challenges of these regulations, so that we could then respond accordingly.”
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“It was a lot of work and great credit goes to James [Allison] and the technical team working with him, as well as the operational team that then performs the miracle of turning ideas into parts as quickly as possible,” emphasizes Lord.
In addition, Mercedes is constantly working under the budget cap to “improve our ability to get the best out of the available financial resources so that this is reflected in the best possible lap time,” says Lord.
At the 2026 summer break, Mercedes leads the constructors’ championship by 72 points over closest rival Ferrari. In the drivers’ championship, Kimi Antonelli already has a 50-point lead over second-placed Lewis Hamilton.
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