Mercedes boss Toto Wolff has said that its rear suspension upgrade will be going “in a bin” by the time Formula 1 returns at the end of the month.
The German marque has largely seen a downturn in form since introducing the upgrade at the Emilia-Romagna Grand Prix in May.
A brief revert back to its original design followed for Monaco and Spain, but was reintroduced for the Canadian Grand Prix, where George Russell took victory, with Andrea Kimi Antonelli coming in third.
This convinced the team to continue with it, leading Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin to admit that the Canadian triumph was a misleading moment.
Since Russell’s win, the Brackley-based squad has suffered performance issues, culminating in a torrid weekend in Spa.
This convinced the team to ditch the upgrade again for last weekend’s Hungarian Grand Prix, in which Russell narrowly missed out on pole, and finished third.
The negative feedback given by both Russell and Antonelli were enough to convince Wolff to determine to media including Motorsport Week that “that rear axle will be ending in a bin somewhere, I guess”.
The Austrian said that the upgrade may have cured the issues plaguing W16 before Imola, but caused issues to it that were not pre-existing.
“We tried to solve a problem with the Imola upgrade and that may have solved an issue, but it let something else creep into the car,” said Wolff. “That was an instability that basically took all confidence from the drivers.
“It took us a few races to figure that out. Obviously, we were misled a bit by the Montreal win; you think maybe that’s not so bad.
“We came to the conclusion it needed to come off, it went off and the car’s back to solid form.”
Wolff admits upgrade ‘tripped us over,’ confirms ‘no more upgrades’
Wolff admitted that there are still some flaws with some of the technology used to produce such upgrades, saying that “they are here to bring performance and there’s a lot of simulation and analysis that goes into putting parts on the car,” adding: “Then they’re just utterly wrong and you need to go back to the analogue world and put it on the car and see what it does and it doesn’t do what it should do.
“That’s the tricky bit for everyone in Formula 1: how do you bring correlation from what the digital world tells you into the real world?
“That has been a feature [of Mercedes over recent seasons] and this is the last example of how it tripped us over.”
Wolff also confirmed that there will be no more updates for the W16, saying that work on the 2026 car is now the top priority back at its Brackley HQ.
“There’s no more upgrades,” said Wolff. “Everything is completely focused and concentrated on next year.
“Now we know that we have a more stable platform that’s going to give us some goodness.
“Let’s see how we can optimise tracks in terms of finding the right set-ups and then be as competitive as we can.”
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