New details of Mercedes’ ‘crisis meeting’ emerge as Toto Wolff sets record straight

A meeting of senior Mercedes staff last week was speculated as being a crisis meeting after a spell of difficult races for the Brackley-based squad.

Following a difficult weekend at Spa-Francorchamps, Mercedes was reported as having called a crisis meeting aimed at attempting to figure out why its form in F1 2025 has been so inconsistent.

The truth behind Mercedes’ emergency meeting

After the Belgian Grand Prix, in which George Russell finished a distant fifth while Kimi Antonelli failed to score points after toiling towards the back of the field throughout the weekend, some media reports suggested Mercedes had called its drivers and senior engineering staff to Brackley in order to have an emergency meeting to identify the cause of the performance drop-off.

Since claiming a 1-3 finish in Montreal with Russell and Antonelli, Mercedes endured a difficult run of races without any podium finishes until Budapest – this run was particularly difficult for Antonelli, as he has only scored a solitary point since claiming his maiden podium in Canada.

As reported by PlanetF1.com last week, the ’emergency meeting’ was more akin to a routine post-event debrief as are usually held on Mondays after a Grand Prix, albeit in this case took on greater significance than usual given the context of the performance difficulties.

With time running out before the summer break’s mandatory factory shutdown, it’s understood that Mercedes‘ focus was on figuring out how to maximise its package for the remainder of the season.

Speaking over the weekend in Budapest, team boss Toto Wolff clarified to Sky Germany the nature of the meeting.

“We have meetings every week to assess where the car stands and what we can improve,” the Austrian explained.

“And one of those meetings was last week, exactly as planned, with the drivers. We do that regularly, every few months. That was the ‘big’ meeting. And it was very interesting.”

Team representative Bradley Lord elucidated further on the meeting as he spoke before the Hungarian GP, offering clarification on the rationale for the more in-depth debrief.

“So we have a quarterly, what’s called driver development meeting, where the drivers and a broader cross-section of the technical side of the team meet,” he explained to select media, including PlanetF1.com.

“And that was planned and had been planned for many months for Monday. So it happened to coincide rather than it being a hastily called crisis meeting or everything else that we’ve read.

“That meeting took place, and rather than being in the detail of each race weekend, it’s a chance every couple of months for everyone to step back and just take a look at the evolution performance over a number of races.

“So that’s what that was, and that’s what took place. It was planned already on Thursday, Wednesday, you know, been in the diary for a long time, rather than being something that was assembled in response to the Spa weekend.”

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Mercedes rear suspension changes yield reward

A theory offered by Russell after the Belgian race was that revisions to the front wing to conform with the FIA’s flexi-wing technical directive could have been a trigger, even though Mercedes claimed a 1-3 finish shortly after these changes were made.

For Budapest, Mercedes opted to switch to an older-specification rear suspension, going back to a known baseline of stability and performance for the drivers by using the suspension that had been in play before the European season began at Imola.

This change was explained by Mercedes’ head of trackside engineering, Andrew Shovlin before the competitive action began, in which he suggested the true picture of performance had been clouded by inclement weather across a number of weekends.

“In a way, it’s [suspension change] always been on the radar,” he told media, including PlanetF1.com, on Friday in Budapest.

“One of the inconvenient facts was that that was on the car in Montreal, where we had a very good weekend.

“Now, that circuit is very different from some of the recent ones, but if we look over the past three tracks, high-speed performance hasn’t been where it was; the drivers talked about lacking entry stability and then just this general sense that they didn’t have the trust in the car that they did earlier in the weekend.

“With the wet races that we’ve had, perhaps arriving at that conclusion wasn’t as swift as if we’d had a straightforward run of dry races and dry sessions.

Then, on top of that, we had another set of experiments that we were playing with around the time of Montreal and Austria, but we were starting to get to a stage where the next logical thing is to wind back on that change and see if we can recover that stability that they are craving.”

Mercedes’ experiment was to try the older rear suspension in isolation, and it was an experiment that appeared to pay dividends as both Russell and Antonelli appeared happier with the car’s stability.

While a poor qualifying cost Antonelli dearly on Saturday before recovering to 10th on Sunday, Russell was able to overtake Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc en route to his first podium since Canada and only his second since finishing in third at Imola back in May.

Speaking in the team’s official debrief, Shovlin said it’s now clear the newer-spec rear suspension had not yielded the pace improvements that had been anticipated.

“Well, if we make a new suspension, we’re doing it to make the car go quicker,” he said.

“And clearly, there’s something that wasn’t right.

“There are areas where the drivers said the car was definitely better with that suspension.

“But, when it came to stability in the fast corners, some of the corners where they’re having to carry a lot of speed on entry, they didn’t have confidence to push the car like they would like to.

“So as I said, we’d always try and make things that improve the pace of the car. This didn’t. And a lot of the work that’s going on now is to understand exactly what is it that has caused that problem.

“And it’s not something that was dead obvious. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had the issue in the first place. But there’ll be a lot of learning in there. Some of it will benefit us this year. But importantly, it’ll benefit us for the future.”

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