Mercedes continues to search for its identity in a season that remains a sort of rite of passage toward the team’s real objective: 2026, when new technical regulations will be introduced and the ambitions will be much higher than they are now.
That doesn’t mean Brackley isn’t constantly working to try and unravel the situation and allow the W16 cars of George Russell and Andrea Kimi Antonelli to make the most of the tyres—without experiencing the rear-axle overheating issues that have been affecting performance since Melbourne.
This weekend, Formula 1 returns to Canada at Montreal’s Gilles Villeneuve circuit. It’s a semi-permanent track where Pirelli will bring, for the third time this season, the softest compounds of its 2025 range: the C6s.
While Mercedes is working to improve tyre management, Antonelli is looking for a better way to make use of the softer compounds in qualifying—and therefore start higher up the grid on Sunday. That’s why understanding how to get the C6s into the right operating window could prove to be the winning move.
“Canada will be a very different track compared to the last few, as will the asphalt, and the C6 compound will return. I really think it will be very important to better understand the behaviour of this tyre.”
“My goal will also be to put everything together over the weekend, because I really think there’s potential. In Barcelona, in qualifying, I did well, but there was still more performance to extract. I only did one flying lap, but I wasn’t able to pull it all together.”
“As I said, it will be very important to better understand the C6s, especially when we get to qualifying with changing conditions. We’ll need to figure out how to extract the most from the C6s, because as we saw in Imola and Monaco, it’s a compound with a very narrow operating window—and if you’re not in that window, you can’t use the grip it offers. So, it’s really important to understand how to always get it into the right window at the start of a flying lap.”
For Mercedes, it will also be crucial to recover reliability, after Antonelli was forced to retire twice in the last three race weekends due to technical problems. Both at Imola and Barcelona, the Italian driver had to end his race early. In short, for the team led by Toto Wolff, it’s a multi-faceted task that must enable them to react quickly and build a solid foundation in terms of operations and reaction times if needed in 2026.
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