Mercedes hits development freeze after costly spate of crashes

Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff has revealed that the financial strain of recent crashes suffered by the Brackley squad has forced it to prematurely halt its current development programme.

The team’s 2024 budget – capped at approximately $135 million by F1’s fiscal regulations – has been significantly impacted by several incidents since the summer, with crashes by Andrea Kimi Antonelli in Monza and George Russell in Austin and Mexico.

Russell’s accident in last Friday’s second practice session at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez resulted in the need for a completely new chassis – an expensive setback for Mercedes.

"In the cost cap landscape, it is a tricky situation,” admitted Wolff.

"These three shunts put us on the back foot, and certainly the one that happened [on Friday in Mexico] was massive. We had to opt for a completely new chassis and that is a tremendous hit in the cost cap.”

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The financial implications mean that Mercedes will no longer be able to push forward with its planned upgrades.

"We probably have to dial down on what we put on the car,” the Austrian added. “So we'll be having two upgrade packages in Brazil, two floors, but that's basically it. There's nothing else that's going to come.

"We have certain limitation on parts where we need to be creative how we're managing them. And certainly there is an impact on how many development parts we can put on the car, because the answer is zero."

Despite the mounting costs and risk of further financial strain, Wolff emphasized that the team did not restrict Lewis Hamilton and George Russell from racing each other hard in Mexico.

"They are so good and so experienced that we allow the racing," he explained. "There was not a feeling where I thought it's getting a bit hairy.

"I think we made the call to George at the end, where it was clear that Lewis was the faster car, to maybe [tell him] that one defence on the straight was a bit of a late move. But I don't have any doubts in the two."

Wolff alluded to Mercedes having two new-spec floors at its disposal in Brazil. However, the team could opt once again to split its packages depending on driver feedback.

"I'm always open-minded about what the drivers think,” he said.

"If I'm certain that George is going to go for the new, Lewis may want to back-to-back the old floor now in Brazil. We will certainly talk with him and see what his preference is."

Wolff explained that Hamilton’s decision to potentially revert to the older floor design is rooted in Mercedes still grappling to understand its car’s delicate handling and instability.

"There may be something in the aero update package that causes something that we don't understand because we had two massive crashes in the same corner in Austin. But then we had a crash on the old car too,” Wolff noted.

"These cars are so on the knife's edge that it will be an interesting experiment in Brazil, to see whether there is a high-speed instability or a low-speed factor.

“I don't think we can just extrapolate that one is better than the other."

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