Ex-Mercedes Formula 1 Technical Director Paddy Lowe has attributed the ongoing struggles the team has faced to taking “wrong turns” under the current regulations.
Mercedes entered the latest rules overhaul as the side to beat having achieved an unprecedented eight consecutive Constructors’ Championships from 2014 to 2021.
However, the German marque has come unstuck since F1 reverted to ground effect aero in 2022 and endured a first winless season since 2011 in the past campaign.
The optimism that derived from changing to a revised car concept this term has not delivered the anticipated step as the W15 has not been a match to its main rivals.
George Russell admitted Mercedes overcompensated with the alterations it made over the winter, with Lowe suspecting it could take the squad a long time to recover.
“I have a lot of sympathy and in fairness if you talk to teams that are doing well if they aren’t too arrogant and they will say, ‘You should count on having good fortune in this sport when you have a good car and don’t assume it is always from your own brilliance’,” Lowe told Motorsport.com.
“That is a message that most of us have learned over the years. Mercedes have made some wrong turns aerodynamically.
“The tools that we use are incredibly sophisticated, wind tunnels and CFD and so on but nevertheless highly flawed and all teams will admit this.
“Therefore, there is always risk you go down an avenue that doesn’t work in real life and then you have to recover, and you can see that has been the case with Mercedes.
“That is very difficult to recover simply over a matter of time.
“Your team has huge numbers of people and all of your machinery for testing and evaluating ideas should be churning out lap time on a daily basis, and if your competitors are doing that and you have, say, lost three, four, six months for whatever reason, even if you get back on track it is very difficult to produce lap time at a higher rate than they are,
so you remain with this offset for a long time as you try and claw it back.
Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has been encouraged with the latest developments the team has brought and is convinced the team is back on the right track this season.
When asked whether he held faith in Mercedes to rebound from its various setbacks, Lowe answered: “You may or may not get there. It may get worse.
“This is the nature of the sport and why it is so fascinating to watch as champions come and go.
“Empires rise and fall, and I always thought Formula 1 was a bit like that, a bit like the Romans and the Greeks.
“There are lots of components to that and complacency can be one of them, and we saw that with the Romans.
“We were very happy in 1992 at Williams to beat McLaren, who had seen unbeatable for some years.
“And you come out and you beat them, and you can’t believe it to start with, but something has changed and lots of thing can contribute to it.”
Lowe, who worked at Mercedes between 2013 and 2017, thinks the regulation overhaul coming in 2025 will constitute the team’s greatest chance to return to the top.
“The 2026 regulations will be a disturbance that Mercedes are looking forward to see if they can disturb the status quo,” he added.
“But unfortunately today’s formula is very much about optimisation at a micro level on top of some basic structures that you chose or copy or evolve to and then it is about optimisation, and it is very difficult to make step changes within that space.”
