The moving goalposts, when it comes to allegories and idioms about luck, sidestep from "third time's the charm" to "bad luck comes in threes". And, when it comes to Formula 1's current technical regulations, Mercedes' own expectations may make a similar step as its third car in this ruleset - the W15 - could not bring an end to the difficulties it has faced with building a consistent race winner.
Sure, it won the most races of any car it has produced since 2022, but the team was also a distant fourth behind McLaren, Ferrari, and Red Bull in the constructors' championship. This rather lays the inconsistency of the W15 bare, as the car often struggled to walk a high-wire act between keeping its Pirelli tyres in their temperature window and overheating them to a point where the car rarely felt malleable for either George Russell or Lewis Hamilton. In cooler conditions with smoother track surfaces, this flaw was rarely an issue, but those stars had not aligned at the majority of 2024's races...
