Antonelli upbeat as Mercedes makes progress with upgraded W17

Mercedes believes it is beginning to unlock the performance promised by its latest W17 upgrade, with championship leader Kimi Antonelli reporting encouraging progress after Friday’s practice sessions at the United States Grand Prix.

The Silver Arrows arrived at Austin’s Circuit of The Americas with another front-wing option designed to complement the substantial package introduced in Malaysia.

That earlier development raised the car’s performance ceiling, but extracting its full potential has proved a more complicated exercise, leaving the team searching for the right balance and operating window.

After experimenting with different specifications in Singapore, Mercedes has now reunited Antonelli and George Russell on the same configuration. The decision appears to be paying dividends, with Friday’s running offering fresh clues about how to make the revised W17 consistently competitive.

Antonelli sees encouraging signs in Austin

Antonelli ended Friday’s second practice just 0.042 seconds behind Ferrari’s Charles Leclerc, providing a promising indication of the pace Mercedes can unleash when its set-up begins to click.

More importantly, the Italian felt a tangible improvement in the car’s behaviour between the opening session and the afternoon, suggesting the team is making headway in its efforts to tame the upgrade.

"I felt better in the car compared to FP1," Antonelli said. "There is still lots of work to do, but it was a good step forward and now we'll try to improve even further.

“Having both cars on the same package helps, because we can try lots of different stuff and we can have a better understanding of this package.

"Since Singapore we were able to analyse the data and understand better what this package needs. We're still trying to find how to put the car in the right window, but we've been taking steps forward and we'll see what we can do to improve even more."

The progress is particularly encouraging given the challenges posed by COTA’s demanding layout, where the combination of rapid direction changes, heavy braking and a technically difficult final sector places considerable demands on both the car and its tyres.

Shovlin identifies a turning point

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin acknowledged that the team had struggled to get its initial approach working, with excessive locking compromising performance over both a single lap and longer runs.

However, changes made ahead of the afternoon session helped bring the car into a more manageable operating range, giving the engineers a stronger foundation from which to continue refining the package.

"We didn’t have a good first session,” he explained. “We were looking to explore a wider set-up window with the update package on both cars, but we were struggling with locking, which was a big limitation in both our single-lap work and the long runs.

"We repositioned the cars going into the afternoon session and that seems to have put us in a better place. We had fewer balance issues, the car was more predictable, and the lap times improved as a result."

• Read also: The Austin scenarios that could crown Antonelli champion

Russell finished fifth, around seven tenths of a second off Leclerc’s benchmark, although his qualifying simulations were compromised by a deleted lap for track limits and a major snap through the Esses on his subsequent attempt.

Although Austin offers Antonelli a theoretical opportunity to clinch his maiden world championship, Mercedes is keeping its attention firmly on the immediate task: translating its progress into a competitive weekend and collecting the points that matter.

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