Mercedes continues to work to unravel the puzzle and close the gap to the three teams currently lighting up the 2025 Formula 1 World Championship, but things once again didn’t go as hoped at Imola.
While in qualifying George Russell’s W16 managed to be the closest challenger to Oscar Piastri—who took pole—and Max Verstappen (who went on to win the Grand Prix), the race saw a sharp and clear drop-off in performance.
The British driver almost never had enough race pace—not only to keep up with the cars in front but also to defend from those behind. Ferrari, despite major struggles in qualifying, bounced back from a dreadful Saturday and finished ahead of George, while Andrea Kimi Antonelli was forced to retire from his home race due to a throttle failure on his car.
After the race, Bradley Lord—Mercedes Head of Communications and, last weekend, acting Team Principal in place of the absent Toto Wolff (who was attending his son’s graduation in Los Angeles)—offered an explanation that confirms the difficulties faced by the Brackley team.
The Silver Arrows perform well over a single lap, but in race conditions the rear tyres overheat, putting the drivers in trouble. What made things even more complicated was the growing gap between single-lap performance and long-run pace.
“Certainly, the main limitation today was the rear axle and the overheating at the back end. This year, at some circuits, we’ve been limited at the front axle, so the work this weekend focused on the rear axle and that was clearly our biggest weakness,” Lord confirmed.
“It’s clear that the gap between our qualifying pace and our race pace was even larger this weekend, rather than smaller as we had hoped from the work we’ve done. So there’s a lot to analyse and understand—where we’ve actually made improvements with the car and where perhaps we’ve gone down the wrong path and need to change our thinking or approach to reduce the delta between single-lap pace and long-run pace. Because certainly today there were many cars that qualified behind us but matched or even outpaced us over longer stints.”
Over the Imola weekend, Mercedes introduced significant updates to the W16—although 2025 Technical Director Simone Resta downplayed them as “a small package”—including a new front wing, an aerodynamic tweak to the front suspension, and a more tapered engine cover.
According to Lord, the W16’s performance has improved. But race pace remains the main weakness. The car reaches the upper limit of the tyre’s usable window too quickly, which causes overheating, while other cars approach that limit more gradually, avoiding or controlling the overheating and managing more competitive laps in succession.
“I think overall we’ve seen an improvement in car performance in terms of general pace, but that remains our biggest limitation. As I said, this weekend has been a bit different from what we’ve seen at other races—and it’s not just overheating… It is tyre overheating, but more specifically, it’s that we reach the upper end of the usable window faster than other cars, which seem able to run at a strong pace for longer before hitting that limit—or simply never hit it—thus being able to exploit their full pace for much longer. That’s what we need to understand.”
“It’s clear this continues a trend from last year, though there are subtle differences. So yes, this is the top priority to understand and work on, so that we can start racing as we’ve done at times this season and, more generally, perform in the same window in the race as we do in qualifying—especially in slightly cooler conditions.”
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