For the third season in a row, Lewis Hamilton struggled to hide his disappointment with his Mercedes car following the second round of the Formula One campaign in Saudi Arabia.
“We have definitely got to make some big changes,” he told Sky Sports after finishing in ninth place. “We haven’t made big enough changes, perhaps. If you look at the three teams ahead of us, they still have a different concept to where we are in some areas. So we have got some performance to add, for sure.”
For the most part, the noises coming from Mercedes during this year’s preseason had been cautiously optimistic. The team appeared confident that it had finally navigated its way out of the developmental cul-de-sac of the previous two seasons, and initial impressions from Bahrain testing were that the W15 would be a much better platform on which to build performance.
After two races with the new car, though, it’s clear Mercedes is not where it wants to be.
Based purely on points scored — which, granted, only tell part of the story — Mercedes is already 12 points shy of where it was at the same stage in 2022 and 2023. While the situation may not be as bad as that statistic suggests, there are significant issues the team must address ahead of the next two rounds in Melbourne and Suzuka.
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At the first race in Bahrain, an overheating issue was to blame for the lacklustre race performance, costing the drivers more than 0.5 in time per lap. But in Saudi Arabia, the car ran reliably and was simply lacking performance to its rivals.
In high-speed corners, which make up a large proportion of the lap in Jeddah, the W15 was losing significant time. In the first sector alone, Hamilton and teammate George Russell were 0.4s down on Max Verstappen‘s Red Bull and also a good chunk slower than the Ferraris and McLarens. Over the entire lap, Russell (the fastest of the two Mercedes) was 0.844s shy of Verstappen’s pole lap.
Through Turns 6 to 8 in sector one, the car was bouncing in a way that brought back unwanted memories of the problems Mercedes faced in the first year of the current regulation cycle.
Since F1’s rules revolution in 2022, the airflow underneath the car has become the key…
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