Mercedes director reveals team's 'most destructive pattern'

Lewis Hamilton looks sad, with his W14 in the background — Photo: © LAT Images

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Mercedes director reveals team's 'most destructive pattern'

The team have endured a rough couple of seasons

Sam Cook Digital Journalist

Sports Journalist who has been covering motorsport since 2023

Saturday 9 December 2023 17:57

Mercedes' technical director James Allison has revealed that the team fragmented during the early part of 2022, slipping into a 'destructive pattern'.

The Brackley-based team all of a sudden had to adapt from being a team that had won eight consecutive constructors' world championships to struggling to get onto the podium at each race weekend, as Red Bull and Ferrari got the jump on them with the introduction of new regulations.

While they did manage to catch and pass Ferrari in 2023, the gap to Red Bull became even more evident as the world champions raced away with both championships.

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It means that Mercedes have only managed one race victory in the last two seasons, while star driver Lewis Hamilton is without a win since the 2021 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.

James Allison is a key part of the Mercedes F1 team

George Russell was the last Mercedes driver to win a Grand Prix, at the Brazilian GP in 2022

Mercedes struggled in 2023, with Lewis Hamilton unable to provide a challenge to Red Bull's Max Verstappen

Mercedes' destructive pattern

1997 world champion Jacques Villeneuve recently said that he believes Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has 'lost his marbles' over the last couple of seasons, and Allison now seems to have confirmed that has been the case for a lot of the team.

“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.

“The short-term pressures are that the car is poor and the results are poor and they must improve,” he explained. “And the call of that is very loud, completely natural, but very loud nevertheless, and it rouses people to action.

“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 see as their part in making the world a better place.

"Probably the most destructive pattern that we as a group got into over that difficult period from when our crown first slipped, was that we fragmented more than we should have done.”

Red Bull Lewis Hamilton Ferrari Mercedes 2023 James Allison