The stunning admission of failure that could condemn the Mercedes golden era to history

We often talk about the truism of motor racing that the first person every driver must beat is their teammate.

Less talked about it the constructor-equivalent maxim: never be beaten by your customer teams.

It’s the golden rule of running a race team, and Mercedes broke it in Bahrain, where it was trounced by Aston Martin.

Quite aside from Aston Martin’s truly remarkable improvement from seventh in last year’s constructors championship to apparent contention for second in the standings is the fact that it appears to be taking its place among the frontrunners at the expense of Mercedes, on which it is reliant for a lot of its car.

The AMR23 isn’t just propelled by the Mercedes power unit, it’s also built around the entire Mercedes back end, including the gearbox and rear suspension, as well as using the Mercedes hydraulics system. It was even designed in the Mercedes wind tunnel.

So you can understand why Mercedes was so distraught by the result in Bahrain. It’s not just about the pace of its car or its position at the flag. It’s about the fact that another team has bought a bunch of Mercedes performance parts and made them work more effectively.

It is extremely humbling for a team that won its eighth consecutive constructors championship barely 16 months ago.

How bad is it really?

It’s not as if Mercedes is suddenly stuck in the midfield or troubled with unreliability, but the reality of its lack of competitiveness relative to Red Bull Racing is difficult to accept.

On one level it’s painful because, like every team every year, Mercedes expected to take a step forward during the off-season. Team boss Toto Wolff has said that the team had set and met some ambitious development targets, so to learn they weren’t enough to return to victory contention — not even close — would be immensely disappointing.

But it’s worse than that. Not only has Mercedes slipped backwards relative to its expectations, but it’s slipped backwards year on year.

“When you look at where we were at the end of the season when it seemed like we caught up a lot and it was just a matter of which circuit suited us and which not,” team boss Toto Wolff said, per RaceFans. “I think we’ve almost doubled if not tripled the gap to Red Bull. And this is what we need to look at.”

And while Red Bull Racing has obviously made a break from the pack, that’s not the whole story. Ferrari, for example, looks like it’s still probably within a tenth or so in qualifying trim, so more or less where it was last season, and the Italian team is confident that race pace can be unlocked at less abrasive tracks.

Mercedes, on the other hand, had neither qualifying speed nor race pace — another step backwards on last year, when at least its poor Saturday performance came in exchange for strong tyre usage on Sunday that saw it capable of sniping for podiums.

Having deliberately said via press release at the launch of the W14 that the car would “eventually be competitive enough to fight at the very front of the grid”, the facts of a depressing Sunday led to a stunning admission of failure from Wolff on behalf of his team.

“I don’t think that this package is going to be competitive eventually,” he said, per The Race. “We gave it our best go, also over the winter, and now we just need to all regroup, sit down with the engineers who were totally not dogmatic about anything, no holy cows, and decide what is the development direction that we want to pursue in order to be competitive [enough] to win races.”

It also means the team has effectively abandoned hope that even the major upgrade slated for late May will improve its lot.

“I think it needs to be much more radical steps than just hope for a 0.3-seconds upgrade,” he told Sky Sports.

Effectively this car is going in the bin after one round of 23.

What went wrong?

There are two major schools of thought when it comes to design philosophy under the current regulations.

The dominant one is Red Bull Racing, which most teams have heavily borrowed from since last year.

Ferrari also has some influence, though it’s difficult to know how effective its car can be considering its litany of other problems that have hamstrung its performances

But Mercedes subscribes to neither. The hint is in those radical sidepods, but really the key aerodynamic differences relate to the floor, which is where most downforce is generated and most of which is out of sight.

Mercedes had to decide last year whether to double down on its philosophy or adapt the designs of other cars for 2023.

It decided to give its ideas a second crack and has immediately been proven incorrect by its own admission.

“We set ourselves very high targets and we have achieved them,” Wolff said, per The Race. “It is where we set the targets, collectively, and how we need to change the perspective.”

It’s useful to reflect on the commentary of technical director Mike Elliott at the W14’s launch last month.

“I think at times last year we were questioning ourselves and saying, ‘Have we made a major mistake? Do we need to change what we’re fundamentally doing?’,” he said.

“But I think we know if you go and tear it all up and start again, you’re going to start further backwards. So it’s about making those right decisions.

“And I think although we had problems with the car last year, there was also a lot of goodness in the car.

“So I think you have to be careful not to just throw it all away and start again.”

So was the team too proud or too risk averse or some combination of the two to believe that it could be wrong when other teams were right? Did it assume that its “perspective” had to be the correct one?

Or does the team not have the tools to understand why its car doesn’t work while other designs are faster?

Whatever the case, the whip has now been cracked. The rebuild starts now.

Can Mercedes just copy Aston Martin

Ironically Mercedes’s decision to throw out its current car in favour of a fresh start has probably been progressed helpfully by Aston Martin, which has shown what’s possibly in a tight time frame and with Mercedes parts

“I think it’s just radical,” Wolff told Sky Sports. “They deserve to be where they are because they did a fantastic job.

“The good news for us is there’s a lot of Mercedes in there, so we know where to pinpoint it, so that will be helpful in the recovery.”

The turnaround is encouraging that a rebuild might not be a years-long exercise.

But replicating Aston Martin’s success isn’t as easy as it seem.

First, we’re not comparing like for like when we put Aston Martin and Mercedes side by side.

The key reason is Formula 1’s equalisation measures, which limit time in the wind tunnel based on where a team finishes in the championship. They were introduced in 2021, and Aston Martin might be considered their first big success.

Teams further down the title table are given more development time as a way to help close the field. Every six months a snapshot is taken of the championship order and the wind tunnel hours are set out accordingly.

Midway through last year, when this year’s car was in its early design phase, Aston Martin was eighth in the standings and thus got 50 per cent more time in the wind tunnel compared to Red Bull Racing until the end of December.

Since January this year that’s blown out to 59 per cent thanks to Red Bull Racing’s cost cap penalty.

In those same two periods, Aston Martin has enjoyed 28 per cent and now 23 per cent more development time than Mercedes.

It might sound unusual but eight-time constructors champion Mercedes literally does not have the resources to redesign its car that the former Jordan team had.

The second problem is that it’s unclear whether Mercedes actually understands what’s gone wrong with its car.

All teams experiment with ideas from their rivals as part of standard research and development. Mercedes has admitted that it’s looked into other designs but has continually found that its own idea produces better downforce figures and superior potential.

Yet that obviously isn’t true when the car hits the track. So even if the team sat down and tried to copy Red Bull Racing, it’s far from guaranteed that it will be able to pull it off as well as Aston Martin did.

After all, let’s not forget Aston Martin has form in the copying game — it controversially did the same thing in 2020 with the 2019 Mercedes.

And that creates a third key pressure: the impact on the cost cap.

Mercedes’s decision to change direction immediately is undoubtedly at least in part due to the fact that spending is fixed. Every day spent waiting is more money wasted on the current car — which is money not directed towards the new design.

But the team can’t start work if it doesn’t know what it’s working on or isn’t confident in the decisions it’s making.

This is extremely unfamiliar territory for Mercedes. It’s enjoyed almost a decade of uninterrupted success, of all its decisions having moved it in only forwards.

Yes, Mercedes is still largely that same great team, employing most of those same great people who delivered it those great results. They shouldn’t be discounted.

But now they’re stuck in a quagmire of underperformance of their own making and aren’t convinced they know how to escape, never mind how long it will take.

One of the key questions heading into 2023 was whether Mercedes could prove last year was just a blip or whether it would herald the end of its golden title-winning era.

The answer looks increasingly obvious.