Mercedes’ technical director James Allison admitted the shock of the team’s backwards step in 2022 wrong-footed them at first.
Allison was restored to the position of technical director in April this year after it became clear Mercedes’ second car built to F1’s new regulations was not a sufficient improvement over its first. He said the team found it “very disorientating” to see their title-winning streak end with a season in which they won just one race.
Mercedes largely dominated the 2014 to 2021 seasons, winning all eight constructors’ championships. But their 2022 car only won one race and the team failed to achieve a single victory this year, despite moving up to second place in the standings.
Allison admitted Mercedes struggled to process how badly they were struggling at the beginning of last year, when their drivers were unable to get beyond Q1 at times. “When a team has been, as we were, on a very high plateau for quite a large number of years, for quite a long period of time, and then takes a dip, it’s very disorientating,” he told the Performance People podcast.
“It’s very unpleasant to suddenly feel that what you had previously felt about yourselves as a group, the foundations of that have been loosened by the reality of the stopwatch and being beaten by other teams. It shakes the confidence of an organisation and it also puts a lot of very short-term pressures on a company that’s been used to thinking further ahead.”
The urgent desire to improve the car’s performance was counter-productive at times, Allison explained.
“The short-term pressures are that the car is poor and the results are poor and they must improve. And the call of that is very loud, completely natural, but very loud nevertheless, and it rouses people to action.
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“But the action can tend to be that all the disciplines in the company – the aerodynamics, the vehicle dynamics, the drawing office, all the specialisms that are necessary that work together to create a good car – that each of them can sort of scatter on the four, five, six winds to their individual corners to do what they can do or contribute in the way that they think is best, driven by this very loud call that the car needs to improve.
“If you’re not careful, then those groups can stop talking to one another because they’re all head down trying to fix what they…
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