Mercedes reveal W16 upgrade path with updated F1 2025 target set

With major upgrades for the current cars largely at an end, Mercedes has set itself a target for the final 10 races of the F1 2025 season.

The current regulations cycle comes to an end after this season, meaning all 10 teams are unlikely to bring much by way of major upgrades in the second half of the season.

Mercedes: Friday declarations will become much lighter documents

F1 2025 is the fourth year of the current regulations, and the crossover point at which teams have committed their resources to full-on development for next year has broadly been reached, with any remaining developments for 2025 likely to come from teams who are still chasing some small performance differences out of some potential reward still being within reach this year.

For example, McLaren’s dominant lead this year means the Woking-based squad doesn’t need to push hard on the development front any more but, for the three other front-running teams, some small developments are still likely as Ferrari, Mercedes, and Red Bull eye up the chance to beat each other to the runner-up slot without materially affecting their preparations for next year.

On Fridays at Grand Prix weekends, the teams are forced to engage in ‘show and tell’ procedures in the pit lane, coinciding with the declaration of upgraded components to the FIA, which are then released to the public.

These documents can occasionally be quite comprehensive, depending on the extent of each team’s upgrades for any given weekend. But, in the last 10 races of the year, the lack of upgrades up and down the grid will likely mean the FIA documents will become quite sparse.

For Mercedes, a team still firmly in the hunt for second place in the championship, its season has been dominated by a wayward development path, which has resulted in sporadic flashes of speed through the second quarter of the season.

The early indications following experimentation at the Hungaroring are that a newer-specification rear suspension design has contributed to this misstep, but the team is confident of being able to get back to its early-season form by way of reverting on this and establishing a stable baseline once again from which to refresh itself.

“Given that our belief is that it’s [stability issues] something we’ve brought to the car that has done that, the retracing of those steps is feasible,” Mercedes’ team representative Bradley Lord told select media, including PlanetF1.com, in Hungary, when asked about the extent of upgrades throughout the remainder of the year.

“Obviously, every team development-wise is looking at 2026, and I think we’ll see very little on the Friday declarations in terms of new parts apart from circuit-specific wings and things like that in the second half of the season. So that’s going to be a much lighter document than maybe it would be in a more normal season without the big change that’s coming.

“I think that’s going to be true for every team and is only logical. But that doesn’t mean we stop learning just because we haven’t got aerodynamic performance or upgrades coming to the car.

“So we’ll be aiming to learn as much as we can, particularly around tyre management, how we’re working the tyres, how we’re getting the most from them, and getting temperature out of them, which has been one of the things that we’ve struggled with at some races this season. So that work will be ongoing also because that learning isn’t specific to this generation of car. It’s relevant for every racing car that we’ll make in the future.”

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Mercedes intent on P2 finish in F1 2025

While the focus is now firmly on F1 2026 and the revolutionary ruleset on the way, Lord didn’t outright deny that some more updates for the W16 could be made, but suggested that what could be described as “big” updates won’t be appearing on the car over the remaining races.

“The big upgrades, it would be surprising to see anyone bringing big upgrades from this point onwards,” he said.

“It kind of slightly depends on the semantics of big, whether that means lots of items on the list of declarations or whether it means lap time and things like that.

“But we often see that actually, where the development items dry up, you can still make a lot of progress in your understanding and learning about the car, even with a relatively static configuration performance-wise. So we’ll be aiming to do that and just race as hard as we can for the second part of the season.

“We’re in a close fight with two other teams for ultimately P2 in the championship, and we’ll be giving it everything we’ve got to end up there at the end of the year.”

After four years, one might imagine that several teams would be close to the performance limitations of the regulation set, but Lord pointed to how the current big advantage enjoyed by McLaren suggests that there is a higher ceiling to the ground-effect rules than has been unlocked during this four-year cycle – a potential that ultimately won’t be reached, with McLaren’s MCL39 the closest to get to it.

“I think every single rule sees convergence over time,” he said.

“This one we’ve seen different teams actually with significant advantages in different seasons, so we’re not yet at that convergence point.

“Were they to stay stable for longer, then you certainly would get everyone closing in on the front, we have seen that trend in general over the four years, but we still have dominant teams within this ruleset so the longer they stay stable, the more convergence takes place.

“That’s the sort of historical fact and trend I think in F1.”

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