Mercedes points out the sore spot: 'We didn't have this problem before'.

14:56, 22 Aug

byNicole Mulder

Mercedes experienced a fluctuating first half of the season in 2025. Where the team was regularly fighting for the podium in the first races, the situation has clearly deteriorated after Imola. Team representative Bradley Lord indicates that the team is currently struggling with instability in the car and a lack of confidence from drivers George Russell and Kimi Antonelli.

In a conversation with selected media, including GPblog, Lord sketches a clear divide in the season so far.

“I think we've seen across the first half of the season two pretty clear halves for us.

"A half where we've had consistent performance, the drivers have felt confident in the car and we've had a gap to the fastest cars. But we've been in regular podium contention. That was sort of from Melbourne up until Miami.

"And then from Imola to where we are now, we've seen a more inconsistent performance, which has had a higher peak in Canada.

"So we've had obviously the race win and Kimi's first podium in Canada, which was a great highlight of the season so far.

"But also, on average, we've been further from the field and we've slipped from regular podium contention to more being top five, top six territory in our average race performance.

Lord: 'Earlier this year we did not have this problem'

According to Lord, the drivers are mainly struggling with instability when turning in. As a result, they cannot be dialed in into the corners, which costs the drivers confidence and directly affects performance. Mercedes is now trying to figure out which update caused this.

"We're now retracing our steps to sort of unpick of the many things we've brought to the car, what has introduced that to the car.

"Because it definitely wasn't the case earlier in the year and has become the case in the second quarter," he explains.

According to Lord, the downturn applies not only to the head of the field. "We see a loss of performance to the field as a whole, not just to the front-running cars.

"It's not just a bigger gap to the front. It's that we've moved backwards in the relative pecking order.

"So that's what gives us a measure of belief. It's something we have brought to the car and unintended consequences of that, rather than a lack of development, for example, or a general loss of performance versus every other team on the grid.

Lord emphasizes that finding the cause takes time. There are multiple possibilities and the team must carefully investigate which changes have had an effect.

"There are some decent ideas of certainly where we start that work is higher probability influences.

"There'll be other things that have had no impact on it whatsoever, that we've got to make sure we don't take goodness out of the car as well," says the Brit.

During the Grand Prix weekend in Hungary, which in particular went well for Russell with a podium finish in the race, Mercedes continued to work on finding the right direction.

"If not, we'll keep analysing the data, looking at what we've done to get a handle on it for the second part of the season," concludes Lord.