06/08/2025
NEWS STORY
Mercedes has decided to do away with the rear suspension upgrade introduced at Imola.
The German team is currently evaluating a number of areas in a bid to determine what led to its recent slump.
The upgraded suspension was dropped for the Monaco and Spanish rounds but reintroduced in Canada where George Russell claimed victory, prompting the German team to persevere with it.
However, the subsequent slump, reinforced by criticism from both Russell and teammate Kimi Antonelli, caused the team to think again and eventually revert to the original suspension, going on to enjoy a strong weekend in Hungary.
It is felt that while the upgrade may have helped alleviate issues that plagued the car prior to Imola, once introduced it caused problems of its own.
"We tried to solve a problem with the Imola upgrade and that may have solved an issue, but it let something else creep into the car," admits Toto Wolff. "That was an instability that basically took all confidence from the drivers.
"It took us a few races to figure that out," he reveals. "Obviously, we were misled a bit by the Montreal win, you think maybe that's not so bad. But we came to the conclusion it needed to come off, it went off and the car's back to solid form.
"They are here to bring performance and there's a lot of simulation and analysis that goes into putting parts on the car," he says of upgrades. "Then they're just utterly wrong and you need to go back to the analogue world and put it on the car and see what it does and it doesn't do what it should do. That's the tricky bit for everyone in Formula 1, how do you bring correlation from what the digital world tells you into the real world?
"That has been a feature, and this is the last example of how it tripped us over," he admits.
The Austrian also confirmed that with attention now fully focussed on next season, there will be no further upgrades that might trip his team up.
"There's no more upgrades, everything is completely focused and concentrated on next year.
"Now we know that we have a more stable platform that's going to give us some goodness. Let's see how we can optimise tracks in terms of finding the right set-ups and then be as competitive as we can."