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Mercedes has drawn a clear lesson from the first races with its upgraded W17: the new car is creating more downforce, but it is not spreading that load evenly enough to give drivers confidence in every corner.
The team's assessment, outlined on May 9 by deputy technical director Simone Resta, follows a deliberate split-car experiment at the Singapore Grand Prix. George Russell ran the older specification while Kimi Antonelli carried the upgraded package through the full weekend. With Singapore's mix of high kerbs, heavy braking zones and low-speed corners, it offered a particularly tough test of the new aero concept.
Mercedes came away with a simple headline: the numbers look better, but the balance behaviour still needs work. Resta said the team has achieved its target of adding raw downforce, but the way that downforce arrives has changed the car's front/rear relationship in ways the engineers did not fully anticipate.
The upgraded W17 was initially raced at the Bahrain Grand Prix, where Max Verstappen dominated the first round of the season. That weekend left Mercedes with more questions than answers. Russell's late retirement led to an engine change and a grid penalty for Singapore, which created the opportunity to run a controlled comparison.
So Mercedes committed to an unusual experiment: leave Russell on the older, well understood package and give Antonelli the entire upgraded aero kit. That gave the team a rare, real-world A/B reading of the two versions on the same circuit, without the usual variable of both drivers switching same-spec cars.
Resta admitted that the first-order data is positive.
"We wanted to deliver more performance and more downforce, and we have measured more downforce on the car," he said on Mercedes' Nu Silver Arrows Radio Show. "But it's not a black and white problem. It is not binary. It is a very grey area with multiple variables."
The nuance, he said, is that the new package does not produce the same downforce at every operating point on track. That is altering the car's balance in certain conditions, and both the setup and the driver have to adapt.
"You need to re-centre the window we operate the car, and it's taking some time," Resta added. "And that takes time in a weekend that is relatively short, it's a sprint weekend, where you run a little bit, you do some compares and then you're straight into the sprint. You cannot play anymore with the car."
Resta was also clear about the direction of the imbalance. The upgraded W17 is arriving with more front-end grip than Mercedes expected, which is forcing the operation team to reshape the handling window.
Asked whether the car has stronger front-end response, Resta confirmed: "Stronger front, even perhaps a bit more than we expected."
That may sound like a pleasant problem, but in Formula 1 it can create a knife-edge car. If the front axle takes too much load early in a stint, the driver fights the rear through medium-speed corners. As the tyres wear or fuel loads change, the balance then swings the other way. Mercedes' challenge is to build a setup that works across that moving scale.
The compressed nature of a sprint weekend made that harder. Resta noted that after the short practice window and the sprint race, the team had little time left to chase a different balance direction for qualifying. Because it rained during the sprint, some of the data gathered in that session was less useful for a dry setup.
"It's a long weekend from a clock point of view, but in terms of number of laps and experience, etc., it's relatively short," he said. "So you need to accelerate as much as possible your learning."
Mercedes deputy team principal Bradley Lord used Antonelli's Singapore weekend as proof that the upgraded car contains a higher ceiling. Antonelli struggled on Friday against Russell's old package, but he gradually unlocked more performance as the weekend developed.
"Through that weekend, watching Kimi go from what was quite a frustrating position on Friday where it looked like the updated car was quite a step less competitive than the previous version, he really refocused and chipped away at it from there," Lord said.
The turning point came in the wet sprint. The car was initially oversteery and difficult to manage, but as the front tyres wore, the balance moved into a much happier window. Antonelli started posting some of the fastest sectors and began matching the frontrunners.
"That gave us direction into qualifying and him working with the engineering team and then into the race as well," Lord added. "There is performance in there and this is the direction we need to take the setup and how we're running the car in order to access it more reliably and more frequently."
Antonelli finished on the podium in Singapore, providing a useful reward for a weekend that started with plenty of confusion.
The split-car experiment did more than confirm the presence of extra downforce. It exposed a correlation issue between the design tools and real-world balance behaviour. Mercedes appears to be hitting its performance targets in the wind tunnel and CFD numbers, but the distribution of that performance across ride-height, yaw and tyre-temperature conditions is not matching the model.
That is an unusual admission for a top team, because it moves the conversation away from outright aero efficiency and toward the narrower operating range.
For Mercedes, the short-term fix is not another round of upgrades. It is adaptation: recalibrating the setup procedures, improving the drivers' references and building a more forgiving base window for the upgraded car. The longer-term work will focus on widening that window, likely through mechanical changes and front-wing details rather than chasing more downforce.
The good news for Mercedes is that Antonelli's late-weekend pace shows the upgrade is not a dead end. It is a package with genuine raw performance, but it demands more care to extract it. Until the team masters that process, expect the upgraded W17 to be quick in bursts rather than consistently quick over a full race weekend.
