The Mercedes F1 team and their mindset for tackling Red Bull

Mercedes will debut their new vehicle on February 14, followed by a three-day preseason test in Bahrain beginning February 21 and the season’s first race on March 2.

When asked if the Mercedes team was in a position to challenge Red Bull this year, Allison responded, “I think Toto drew the comparison between climbing Everest and the challenge we have in front of us.” “And I believe it is a fair analogy, because Everest is the most difficult of undertakings, yet it is still feasible to complete.”

“And I believe that’s how we’re approaching this, as a challenger rather than a favourite. Nonetheless, we hope we did a decent job with the new automobile, and that we rectified some of the flaws that were so publicly exposed last year.

“And there’s one thing that lingers in the back of our minds: the regulations themselves have a much clearer upper limit on the amount of lap time these vehicles can produce. They have a much clearer upper bound than the earlier generation of automobiles, which seemed to accelerate indefinitely the more love and effort you put into them.

“I think if you look at last year, you see, from the start of the season to the end of the season, although Red Bull’s dominance was nearly complete, and they didn’t look vulnerable even to the last race of the year, if you look at the bigger picture, this is a grid that is gradually compressing, and all of the cars in Q1 were sort of squashed down within one second of each other.” And this is not a coincidence.

“It’s a trend that began in 2022, continued in 2023, and I believe will continue in 2024, as the gains become increasingly asymptotic. versus then, in addition to us, which I hope worked well, I believe it will be slightly busier around the top of the grid this time around versus last.

“And there, if we are good enough to be in that fight, then operational things – driver excellence, the reliability of the car, the skill of the crews that service it – all of those things start to potentially become the differentiating factors and hopefully there too we’ve given a good wash and brush up to performances that were sometimes less than stellar last year.”