Mercedes has logged its first meaningful mileage of 2026, rolling the W17 out at a cold, wet Silverstone for the team’s opening filming day of the new season.
George Russell and Kimi Antonelli split driving duties on the International Circuit layout, racking up 67 laps between them – just shy of the 200km allowance under filming-day regulations. It’s the sort of number that doesn’t sound dramatic, but in the early life of a brand-new car it’s exactly what the engineers want: clean laps, no drama, systems behaving, and a baseline of data to sanity-check months of design and simulation work.
The W17 had already been shown via renders earlier in the day, but the real tell is always the first time it turns a wheel in public. Mercedes wasn’t especially precious about hiding details either, with social clips showing the car trundling out of the garage and circulating without the kind of camera-angle games teams sometimes play at this stage.
Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ head of trackside engineering, framed it as the straightforward shakedown the team needed.
“We have had a sensible first day of running with the W17 at Silverstone,” Shovlin said. “As with any shakedown, the focus is on ensuring everything operates safely and reliably.
“We were able to get through our allotted mileage, with both George and Kimi getting to experience the 2026 car on track for the first time. That is a testament to the hard work of everyone at Brackley and Brixworth. Our attention now turns to Barcelona, where we will look to build on today’s running and add to our understanding of the W17.”
That last line is the key. A Silverstone filming day in miserable conditions isn’t where lap time gets chased; it’s where you make sure the car is fundamentally healthy before the real work begins at pre-season testing in Barcelona. If something is going to bite you – a persistent sensor issue, a cooling quirk, a software gremlin, an unexpected hydraulic behaviour – you’d rather find it here, at reduced pace and with plenty of margin, than when the clock matters and the run plan is packed.
It also mattered that both drivers got time in the cockpit. Russell has the experience and reference points to tell Mercedes quickly if something feels out of character; Antonelli needs the mileage, full stop. For a young driver stepping into a new-generation car, the “first impressions” phase is not just about comfort but about building a vocabulary with the engineers early, so that when Barcelona arrives the feedback is sharp rather than exploratory.
Mercedes’ social media output captured a slightly lighter tone around the day, including Toto Wolff joining Antonelli trackside to watch Russell circulate. The vibe, as far as you can ever read one from curated clips, was confident enough: no rush to over-sell the moment, but no sense of a team trying to shrink from attention either.
One visible change on the W17 was commercial rather than aerodynamic. The car carried prominent Microsoft branding, with the logo positioned on the airbox above the driver’s head. The team confirmed earlier on Thursday that a new multi-year partnership with the American technology company has begun.
In modern F1, that sort of deal isn’t just sticker space. The public-facing announcement will be about partnership and innovation, but inside the garage it’s another signal of where Mercedes wants to lean: bigger computational muscle, stronger software tools, and the kind of infrastructure that can make small performance gains repeatable. In the 2026 landscape, teams will be living and dying by how quickly they can understand what their new cars are telling them.
Mercedes becomes the latest outfit to put a new 2026 car on track ahead of the first test, following Audi, Cadillac, Racing Bulls and Alpine in completing an early shakedown.
Now it’s over to Barcelona, where “sensible” turns into “useful” and where the W17’s real story begins: not in the number of laps, but in how quickly Mercedes can turn those first cautious kilometres into clear direction.
