James Allison exposes Mercedes advantage that F1 rivals couldn't match

Mercedes technical director James Allison has revealed a major potential reason for the Silver Arrows' dominant start to the season.

The German team won the first six races of the season to leap out into a championship lead which they never relinquished, securing the constructors' title last time out in Brazil.

Allison, speaking on the Nu Silver Arrows Radio Show this week, has suggested that the team's early advantage was due in no small part to them being the first team to actually create a car light enough to be on the weight limit specified in the regulations.

Some teams - including Williams, most infamously - struggled with their car's weight in the early running, with Allison noting that his own team struggled to improve as much as the season went on in part because they simply had no weight to shed.

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Allison: We were already skinny

The team's second-half upgrade packages haven't been nearly as effective as those brought by the likes of Red Bull after the summer break, with former Ferrari man Allison admitting that things haven't exactly worked out as intended in that area.

He explained: "Our final step of performance, our so-called 'Update 18', the thing we brought to the Sepang track and then followed up with the front wing in America... it has given us more downforce, but it has made the car more of a handful."

The Brit continued: "It's got some areas where it has subtracted a bit of performance that we were not expecting."

Speaking on the effectiveness of Mercedes' rivals' upgrades – the team has only mustered one win in five races since the aforementioned Sepang upgrades – Allison said: "We were also probably the only car on the weight limit at the start of the year.

"All the folk we were competing with in the championship had a bit of timber to shift, and that was lap time that came to them that wasn't available to us because we were already skinny and on the limit with the weight."

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