Mercedes’ F1 recovery “difficult” after taking “some wrong turns”

Mercedes dominated the series during the previous rules era, winning both the drivers’ and the constructors’ titles every year from 2014 to 2020.

But the rules overhaul in 2022 left the team on the back foot and has so far been unable to recover to mount a challenge for race wins on a regular basis.

A change to its car concept for 2024 appears to also have failed to help Mercedes lift its form, with George Russell saying after the Miami GP that the team needed to accept it was the fourth-fastest at the moment.

Lowe, who worked at Mercedes from 2013 to 2017, believes the team made some wrong decisions from an aerodynamic point of view when interpreting the current regulations.

The former McLaren and Williams technical director suggested it would take a long time for Mercedes to overcome those setbacks.

Speaking to Autosport/Motorsport.com in an interview, Lowe said: “I have a lot of sympathy and I think in fairness if you talk to teams that are doing well if they aren’t too arrogant and they will say ‘You should count on having good fortune in this sport when you have a good car and don’t assume it is always from your own brilliance’.

“That is a message that most of us have learned over the years.

“Mercedes have made some wrong turns aerodynamically. The tools that we use are incredibly sophisticated, wind tunnels and CFD and so on but nevertheless highly flawed and all teams will admit this.

“Therefore, there is always risk you go down an avenue that doesn’t work in real life and then you have to recover, and you can see that has been the case with Mercedes.

“That is very difficult to recover simply over a matter of time.

“Your team has huge numbers of people and all of your machinery for testing and evaluating ideas should be churning out lap time on a daily basis, and if your competitors are doing that and you have, say, lost three, four, six months for whatever reason, even if you get back on track it is very difficult to produce lap time at a higher rate than they are, so you remain with this offset for a long time as you try and claw it back.

“When I look at Mercedes, this is the situation they are in,” added Lowe, the founder and current CEO of the carbon-neutral synthetic fuel concern Zero Petroleum.

Asked if he…