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Mercedes’ Technical Director James Allison says the way that the team was “working in the previous set of rules” was not well-suited for “the new world”.
After two and a half years of struggles, Mercedes finally managed to get two wins in a row at the Austrian and British grands prix.
The team’s Technical Director James Allison explains what caused the slump in the first place.
“The most significant thing that I would say we could point to inwards at ourselves and say as a criticism, is that the way that we had found of working in the previous set of rules was very effective for the previous set of rules,” the Briton said.
“I don’t just mean like the way we shape the front wing or the particular way that we handled the tyre squirt at the rear of the car.
“I mean that the way the key engineering groups interacted with one another in the team.
“So the aerodynamics with vehicle dynamics, vehicle dynamics with the track, and track with both of those two groups.
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“The way that we were set up in the old world worked just fine. And not just fine, it worked for eight seasons on the trot, something no one has ever done before, it was pretty impressive.
“But we, to a large extent, carried on with that way of working together under different circumstances and were insufficiently self-critical to recognise that there were weaknesses inherent in that approach in the new world that didn’t matter in the old. We definitely paid a price for that.
“The cars are all so uncomfortably near to the ground in this set of rules that suspension and aerodynamics have to be really, really, really tightly bound up with one another.
“In the old world, they sort of needed to be cousins, but they didn’t need to be really, really properly embedded in each other’s worlds.
“Actually, it would have been inefficient in the old world to spend time fretting about the interaction of one group on the other in a particularly intense way, because they were sort of orthogonal to each other to some extent.
“Now they are just completely in bed and the interaction has to be very tight,” Allison concluded.
