Mercedes recently rowed back on a rear suspension upgrade that Toto Wolff has said will likely “end up in a bin”.
The rear suspension upgrade Mercedes introduced for the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix will be “in a bin” for the rest of the F1 2025 season, with the components introduced bringing about a lack of driver confidence, particularly on high-speed corner entry.
Toto Wolff: Imola upgrade ‘let something creep in’ on W16
Over the first quarter of the F1 2025 season, the Mercedes W16 proved competitive and versatile in the hands of George Russell and Kimi Antonelli, with regular strong points finishes and occasional podium finishes.
But, during the second quarter of the season, this form ebbed away, with the team becoming aware that some element of its own development path had brought the car down an incorrect development path.
In Hungary, the team reverted to an older-specification rear suspension setup that had been used up until the start of the European season, which seemed to yield immediate results as Russell returned to the podium and saw a more confident performance for Antonelli, even if his end result of 10th place was somewhat underwhelming.
With Mercedes having taken a 1-3 finish in Montreal in June, catching the issue took a little longer than might have been the case without that triumph, with Wolff explaining the team’s approach to identifying the issues after the chequered flag in Budapest.
“I think that we tried to solve a problem with the Imola upgrade, with a mechanical upgrade,” he said.
“That may or may not have solved an issue, but it let something else creep into the car.
“That was an instability that basically took all confidence from the drivers, and it took us a few races to figure that out.
“Obviously, we were also misled a little bit by the Montreal win, we thought maybe that’s not so bad, and we came to the conclusion it needs to go off, it went off, and the car is back to solid form.”
Asked what may become of the upgraded components which appear to have brought the W16 in the wrong direction, Wolff smiled wryly, “Well, that rear-axle will be ending in a bin somewhere, I guess!
“Upgrades are here to bring performance, and there’s a lot of simulations and analysis that go into the parts of the car.
“And then they’re just utterly wrong, and you need to go back to the analogue world and put it in the car and see what it does, and if it doesn’t do what it should do, and that’s a tricky case for everyone in Formula 1.
“How do you bring correlation from what the digital world tells you into the real world, and that has been a feature [in recent years], and this is the last example of how it tripped us all up.”
With all attention now on hitting the ground running for the new regulations coming for F1 2026, Wolff confirmed no more upgrades are planned for the Mercedes W16 as, “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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The revised suspension could have been aimed at increasing the anti-lift properties of the rear of the W16 under braking, although this can come with a side effect of driver feedback being somewhat reduced.
Based on the performance uptick of one weekend at what is an idiosyncratic circuit at the Hungaroring, the decision to revert on the suspension currently looks to have been a correct one. Not only were the drivers happier with the stability of the car, but Russell returned to the podium for the first time since winning in Canada.
Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ head of trackside engineering, said after Budapest that the newer-spec suspension had created a situation for the drivers where they lacked confidence in stability, particularly on high-speed entry, and had been on the radar quite quickly as being potentially behind the driver’s lack of confidence.
“At the time it came in, we had some issues in some of the laboratory work that we were doing, which meant that some of the test results were arriving quite a bit after it had run on track,” he told media, including PlanetF1.com in Budapest.
“We certainly had it under the microscope at that point, because it then subsequently was off the car in Monaco, was off the car in Barcelona, and then we reintroduced it for Montreal.
“In a way, that might have been an inconvenient fact that we reintroduced it at our best race weekend of the year.
“We’re still going through data from lab testing to understand what it was. The reality is that, if we do prove that that’s a problem, we will learn from the experience.
“It’s always quite difficult making suspension changes to existing components, because everything is a compromise. But, if that is the case, we’ll learn from it, and it will be useful in our knowledge of making the next car.
“A lot of the work that’s going on now is to understand exactly what it is that has caused that problem.
“It’s not something that was dead obvious. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had the issue in the first place. But there’ll be a lot of learning in there.”
With only 10 race weekends left, the work might appear to have diminishing returns and be a potential waste of resources and a distraction while the team creates a brand-new, revolutionary W17 for the new regulations.
But, having seemingly figured out a problem of this scale, still allows the team 10 full race weekends of data gathering across a wide selection of circuit types, and Shovlin said much of the learning will still apply for next year.
“Some of it will benefit us this year. But importantly, it’ll benefit us for the future,” he said.
“The cars for 2026 are very, very different. But there will be a lot of elements, particularly around the learning on suspension, where we should be able to take lessons from this year into next year.”
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