Mercedes drop first W16 design clue after significant F1 2024 breakthrough

Mercedes’ Andrew Shovlin says next year’s W16 will be a “close cousin” of the 2024 car, and expects his team to carry out an “evolution” for 2025.

Having taken a significant step forward in performance with their W15 after a change of car concept for 2024, Mercedes’ head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin has opened up on what to expect from next year’s W16.

Andrew Shovlin on the ‘remaining weaknesses’ of W15

During the first two years of the current ground-effect regulations, Mercedes was a team lost as the concept embarked upon by then-technical director Mike Elliott proved one that was difficult to understand and unlock.

Personnel changes made last year resulted in Elliott departing the team, with former technical director James Allison – who had moved on into a chief technical officer role – reverting to the day-to-day F1 work of being the team’s technical director.

Under Allison, Mercedes completely changed their car’s concept for 2024 and, while the W15 had a slow start to life, have made huge gains to end the first half of the 2024 season with what appears to now be one of F1’s quickest machines.

But the W15 isn’t yet F1’s standard-setter, believes Shovlin, who explained the remaining weaknesses that have been identified on the car by the Brackley-based squad as he spoke to select media – including PlanetF1.com – at the Belgian Grand Prix.

“Well, the main remaining weaknesses – in hot conditions at rear-limited circuits, we’re not as good as the McLarens, or Max [Verstappen – Red Bull],” Shovlin said.

“We saw that in Budapest, and we saw that in Austria, but our gap on race pace in Budapest was smaller.

“So I think we’ve made progress there over the sequence of these recent races. If you looked at Silverstone, we were competitive. So I think the main weakness is that, but then everyone’s trying to develop their cars. If you’re not developing at a faster rate than the others, then you will quite quickly slip backward.

“So there’s always going to be a focus just on how much development you can bring. We can only see a month or six weeks into the future because that’s the sort of horizon that you’re working with in your wind tunnel.

“What we don’t know is whether will we be able to keep delivering performance from the wind tunnel, from a vehicle dynamics group, and mechanical design group.

“They’re going to continue to be able to bring performance into the last part of the year, hopefully. We’ve got good ideas, but there’s a lot of work to go through between having an idea and actually having physical parts that you can put on the car and make it go quicker.”

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Where does development go from here for W15 and W16?

With the regulations stable once again for 2025, the final year of the current rulebooks before a massive revolution for ’26, the likelihood is that most teams will simply opt for continuous evolution of the current cars – after all, springing for a completely different approach for next year would not only be risky but also only have a short shelf life before being discarded.

Shovlin hinted that this is the approach Mercedes will employ over the coming months, as the focus switches to considering what to do with the W16.

“We will continue at the factory to find as much performance as we can. So that is what you are calling aggressive development, we’re flat-out trying to find performance,” he said, when asked whether the team intends to continue its push on “aggressive development” of the W15.

“Later on in the year, there have to be discussions around ‘Is it this car or does it wait for the next car?’

“The cost cap inevitably means that those discussions are a trade between performance gain and cost. We do want to be fighting at the front next year. So we’re always going to make decisions that mean that that is a possibility.

“Then, in terms of the wind tunnel, you’ve got the point at which you progressively shift resources from the current car to next year’s car, I think probably every team has already started working on next year’s car.

“But how rapidly you shift that resource over is a factor but teams may find that what works on this car works on next year’s anyway, or vice versa. So it’s not like the challenge we’ll have in 2026, where it’s a completely different beast.”

Explaining that next year’s car will likely be a “close cousin” of this year’s, Shovlin revealed there are still some key decisions to be made.

“We haven’t made decisions yet on does the chassis stay the same? Does the gearbox stay the same?” he said.

“The reality is you probably can’t change everything. We’re at a stage now where we’re trying to evaluate those to look for the best return for your spend in the cost cap.

“However, I think, aerodynamically, our car and most people’s cars will be an evolution of what we have today – there’ll be significant changes on there but you won’t want to change the architecture of the car and take a big hit in the wind tunnel that you then have to recover – I don’t think many people will be doing that.”

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