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For Mercedes, 2026 is a huge opportunity – and a huge test

There once seemed to be no end to the crushing dominance of Mercedes in Formula 1. From 2014-2021, the three-pointed star reigned supreme, winning 15 out of 16 world championships, with only the 2021 drivers’ title eluding it. Since the introduction of the current ground-effect regulations package in 2022, Mercedes has struggled. What started out as a temporary blip became the norm, with expectations evaporating and the team becoming stuck in a loop of failure.

‘Failure’ is a relative term. Over the past three-and-a-half seasons, Mercedes has won six grands prix and finished as high as second in the constructors’ championship without ever dropping out of the top four. That would be an enviable record for most, but not Mercedes. Now, expectations are rising again thanks to the major regulations overhaul in 2026 that will have a profound impact on both the power units and. Many tip Mercedes to get back on top. The question is, can it?

The argument is logical enough. Firstly, Mercedes is a fully integrated works team and such an entity always has an advantage in terms of performance potential, even if rules today have narrowed the notional gap between the factory and customer teams given the requirements for identical hardware and operational parameters. Secondly, the rules reset reduces the reliance on the underfloor aero that Mercedes has never entirely mastered, even though it’s an exaggeration to characterize them as no longer being ground-effect floors. As technical director James Allison said earlier this year, “they’re a step-plane car, so they don’t have that strong aerodynamic seal that the Venturi ground effect cars of the last few years have”. Thirdly, the last time F1 introduced a brand-new power unit package in 2014, Mercedes aced it. Fourthly, there are mutterings in the paddock that Mercedes is in a good place with its engine development program. While such whispers are vague, there are gentle indicators that it is hitting its targets and at the very least it doesn’t appear to be in trouble.

It’s impossible to make an appraisal of its power unit competitiveness until the cars hit the track next year because hearsay is not horsepower. It would also be a surprise if Mercedes is able to replicate the scale of advantage it had in 2014, given some of the conditions that allowed for that have changed. Mercedes AMG High Performance Powertrains at Brixworth remains a formidable organization that is capably led by Hywel Thomas, who replaced Andy Cowell (now Aston Martin team principal) in mid-2020. While the ‘brain drain’ effect of rivals poaching staff, in particular the Red Bull powertrains program that is fielding its first in-house design next year, is often cited as evidence that it’s a weakened organization, there’s little to support that. Instead, rivals have inevitably caught up.

What is crucial is that whereas Mercedes stole a march on the opposition by committing to development earlier than its rivals ahead of 2014, getting a single-cylinder test engine up and running long before final agreement on the regulations was even reached, that’s much harder to do now. The PU development cost cap that is audited annually, combined with the freeze on the current hardware instigated in 2021, means all of the manufacturers should have made a similar investment on largely the same timeline. The Mercedes PU could well emerge as the market leader in 2026, although the challenge of the new regulations with the aim of a 50/50 split of V6 to electric power (the real split is more like 55/45) means there’s plenty of scope for surprises.

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, the Mercedes PU is the best with a notional advantage of several tenths of a second per lap over the opposition. It must then defeat its customer teams – McLaren, Williams and Alpine. While it should comfortably have an advantage over Alpine, and it’s probably too early to expect Williams to be at its best given team principal James Vowles points to 2028 as the first time everything will be in place to fulfil its potential, McLaren is clearly a tough opponent. While team principal Toto Wolff has, with sincerity, spoken of the pride taken in the success of a Mercedes power unit winning championship even in the back of a rival car, there’s no doubt everyone at the Mercedes Brackley base in the UK hates being shown up by McLaren. That’s the key question hanging over Mercedes: can it produce a title-winning car?

Mercedes nailed F1’s last big regulation change in 2014, but the circumstances are a little different this time around. Charles Coates/Getty Images

Under the current regulations, the answer is no. The Mercedes W16 is a decent machine, but it’s not one that can fight for wins regularly. In favorable conditions, such as in Canada, the combination of cool temperatures, short corners and straightline braking played to its strengths (or in some ways masked its weaknesses) and George Russell was able to win from pole position. While McLaren certainly underachieved that weekend, the Mercedes won on merit. The Mercedes might win again this year, with Las Vegas in November the most likely venue, but while it holds second in the constructors’ championship it’s really only been the third-strongest behind Red Bull, which is effectively a one-car team. Since the start of 2022, Mercedes has constantly been troubleshooting and every time one problem has been cured, another pops up. It’s a game of developmental whack-a-mole that has proved enormously frustrating and led to repeated false dawns. While the days of 2022 when its car was a bouncing nightmare are long behind it, there have still been difficulties this year. That was exemplified by the introduction of a rear-suspension upgrade at Imola, one that was dropped for good after Hungary. Although Russell won running this in Montreal, that success actually misled the team given the track characteristics masked the problem. It simply made the rear end too unstable, which led to difficulties for Russell and a nightmare run for rookie teammate Kimi Antonelli. That was on top of the troubles at higher temperatures given the car overworks its rear tires.

This has been the story of Mercedes since 2022. An enormous amount of work has been done to understand its weaknesses and improvements have been made to its design and simulation tools, yet still it can’t quite match McLaren. There’s always some ghost in the machine, a quirk of physics that has confounded it and every time the right course appears to have been set, something blows the ship off course. The team has never entirely got to grips with these ground-effect cars, or truly taken to the challenge of cars that must be run low and stiff to get the best out of them that have a tendency to understeer in slow corners and oversteer in the fast stuff. Last year, it seemed a breakthrough had been made on front-wing flexibility that cured that, but it was only a partial solution.

“From our perspective, it hasn’t been a great deal of fun,” said head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin in Azerbaijan earlier this month of this regulations cycle. “It’s been an interesting engineering challenge. There are lots of areas where the way that we developed a car aerodynamically was insufficient to capture the subtleties of these rules, where the flow under the car is vastly more complicated and dynamic than what we had previously. The more you learn, [the more] you’ll look back and kick yourself that we didn’t think of some things sooner. 

“Where we’ve ended up with the cars being very stiff, very low to the ground. We’ve developed it to an acceptable solution, but the fact is these cars will never, ever have good ride. You’re having to support enormous amounts of end of straight load, whereas with the previous cars, you had much more… well you have more low-speed downforce, but you had a lot less in a straight line. You could run the cars higher because they developed load further away from the road, and that meant you could be much, much softer on the spring. So I think for the drivers alone, they’ll be grateful to get back to cars that do absorb the bumps a bit better. And I think from an engineering challenge, it’d be nice to have something different to work with. But you get back to a stage where the suspension can actually do the job that the suspension is supposed to do, rather than just having to sort of hold up an enormous amount of downforce.”

The good news is that next year’s cars will not run so low. Realistically, they will start off midway between the current ‘lowrider’ machines and the high-rake machines used by most of the grid back in 2021. Intriguingly, Mercedes was one of the last holdouts when it came to running a low-rake car in that period, meaning that it didn’t push the boundaries as far in terms of control of floor-sealing required in that era to maximize the ground-effect of those floors. Even then, that was important even though they were step-floor cars. Perhaps not having to experiment so much in that area pre-2022 meant it was at a deficit in understanding the underlying science both of design and the tools? That’s one of the intangible questions that can define F1 car performance.

It remains to be seen whether Mercedes can produce a top car again in 2026, and it would be naïve simply to argue that new regulations mean a completely fresh start. An F1 car’s performance is always a manifestation of the sum of the team’s people, tools, knowledge, decision-making and the countless other factors that contribute to its pace. That’s what makes next year’s car a stern test of how much Mercedes has really learned, doubly so given in George Russell it has a driver operating at a high level who is unquestionably ready to fight for a world championship.

But it’s the struggles since 2022 that could prove to be the magic bullet for Mercedes. It’s counter-intuitive, but some of the greatest successes when it comes to F1 car design are rooted in failure. For years, Mercedes has been turning over every stone multiple times to understand its problems and none of that knowledge and understanding will be wasted. That’s no guarantee of success next year, because it might be that the weaknesses that have led to its problems over the past four seasons will be the same ones that create difficulties with the 2026 car, but Mercedes has scrutinized its way of working more intensely than any of its rivals. That should mean it has the answers it needs to make the ’26 car a success, but recent history has confounded such expectations and left Mercedes frustrated at every step so next year’s opportunity could also be squandered.  That’s what makes next year simultaneously a huge opportunity for Mercedes, and its greatest test.