Mercedes chief has now identified ‘fundamental weakness’ that they must fix in their 2025 F1 car

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Mercedes chiefs have identified a ‘fundamental weakness’ with their W15 that must be fixed for their 2025 Formula 1 car.

It has been a season of mixed fortunes for the former F1 juggernauts, suffering from a lack of consistency and raw speed.

They won a handful of races during the European leg of the season between Lewis Hamilton and George Russell but during the second half of the year, they fizzled out after identifying an issue with their floor upgrade post-Spa that led to it being taken off and put back on the car successively.

Mercedes introduced a comprehensive aerodynamic upgrade for the US Grand Prix to address some of their problems and it proved to be a step forward, including upgrades to the front wing that provides better aero performance.

As the US GP was a sprint weekend, it proved to be a tough weekend to gather any meaningful data. This was compounded by both Hamilton and Russell crashing over the weekend, inflicting significant damage to their cars.

Things went from bad to worse for Russell in Mexico, when a crash in qualifying led to him needing to revert to a Silverstone-spec car for the race. Hamilton on the newer-spec car appeared to be slower than Russell, leading to some head-scratching among the Silver Arrows engineers.

Mercedes Andrew Shovlin says the team has made the steps forward they wanted with the new package, but there is a weakness they have identified when speaking on their Strategy Debrief video.

Andrew Shovlin says Mercedes must address ‘fundamental issue’ with W15 for 2025 car

Shovlin has explained the main area that has concerned Mercedes this year and while their most recent upgrades were not designed to improve performance in that area, they are working hard to address it for their 2026 challenger.

“We haven’t had such good performance in the dry. The issue that we’re struggling with in this update, a lot of those are the same ones we were struggling with in the previous update,” said Shovlin.

“We tend to be weak in the slow-speed corners, particularly the ones where you’ve got one corner following into another. There is a lot of turning of the car and that’s a weakness we need to work on.

“We didn’t expect this upgrade kit to address that, we wanted it to lift the base performance of the car. So in terms of what we’ve seen, we’re confident that it’s performing as expected, but there are some fundamentals we’ve got to get to grips with to fix them for the W16.”

Lewis Hamilton and George Russell face ‘extremely challenging’ car due to ‘different environments’

The key in the current generation of cars is to have a platform that is compliant across a multitude of different circuits, which is what has been achieved at rivals Red Bull and McLaren.

Mercedes has struggled at circuits that require differing downforce levels, which makes it challenging to drive for Hamilton and Russell.

READ MORE: Everything you need to know about Mercedes AMG F1 Team from team principal to lineage

In Brazil, Hamilton could be heard complaining about the bumps on the newly resurfaced circuit along with Fernando Alonso. Karun Chandhok suggested F1 might want its ‘money back’ because the track appeared to be more bumpy than it was previously.

Mercedes reserve driver Esteban Gutierrez explained why the Mercedes can be a challenging car to drive, particularly at the recent Mexico City GP where the high altitude presented a lot of challenges for brakes and cooling.