Bin day came early at Brackley. Mercedes has quietly parked the rear suspension spec it introduced at Imola, and Toto Wolff doesn’t see it coming back anytime soon. In fact, he quipped the offending rear axle will “end up in a bin.”
The decision follows a choppy middle third of the season for the W16. Early on, George Russell and rookie Kimi Antonelli were making steady headway with a car that looked adaptable and on-song across a range of tracks, banking strong points and the odd podium. But the much-trailed mechanical update bolted on for Imola let something less welcome into the package: a high-speed entry instability that stripped driver confidence.
The symptom was clear; the diagnosis took longer than it should have, in part because Montreal muddied the waters. Mercedes left Canada with a 1–3 and Russell’s win, which bought the upgrade more credit than it perhaps deserved. “We tried to solve a problem with the Imola upgrade,” Wolff explained after Budapest, admitting that while it may have addressed one issue, it invited another. The instability “took all confidence from the drivers,” and the team needed a few races to connect the dots. Once they did, the call was brutal and simple: remove it.
Hungary was the reset. Mercedes reverted to the pre-European-season rear suspension specification and immediately looked more sure-footed. Russell was back on the rostrum for the first time since his Canadian victory; Antonelli’s pace and composure improved, even if the final result only delivered a solitary point. It wasn’t just a result swing—it was the feeling from the cockpit. Confidence, that intangible currency, returned.
Underneath the headlines sits a familiar 2020s-era F1 story: correlation. “Upgrades are here to bring performance,” Wolff said, before acknowledging that sometimes the models don’t tell the full truth. You can run the simulations, pore over the lab work, and still get tripped up when rubber meets tarmac. That was the case here, with the rear end’s behavior under heavy braking and high-speed turn-in not matching expectations. The paddock belief is that the revised geometry was aimed at adding anti-lift under braking, a conceptually tidy gain that can come with a murkier side effect: dulled feedback when you most need trust from the rear.
Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ head of trackside engineering, sketched the internal timeline. The team had flagged concerns early, but some of the crucial lab results were delayed and only landed after the parts had already run. The spec was then taken off the car for Monaco and Barcelona—two circuits where rear stability is sacred—before being reintroduced for Montreal, where the weekend’s success proved misleading. The problem wasn’t obvious at first pass, Shovlin said, which is why the group is still working through the lab data to lock down the exact mechanism. The upside is as old as racing: if an upgrade bites you, it teaches you. That learning will shape how Mercedes approaches the next car.
And that next car is where the energy is going. Don’t expect a late-season development surge on the W16. Wolff has made it clear: no more upgrades are planned, with focus now trained on the W17.
