Mercedes have admitted they "made a mistake" with a key element of their 2022 car design that left them unable to compete with Red Bull and Ferrari.
The Silver Arrows have been the dominant force of Formula 1 in the hybrid era, winning the constructors' title eight seasons in a row. But that streak will come to an end this year with Red Bull now seemingly the team to beat.
Mercedes have not been able to extract the performance from their W13 that they had hoped. Instead of challenging at the front, they have found themselves in no man's land – comfortably better than the midfield teams, but unable to compete with Red Bull and Ferrari on the track.
It has meant that Lewis Hamilton has been unable to continue his on-track rivalry with Max Verstappen, which created a tense and enthralling title race last year. Instead, the Dutchman and his team have been dominant while Hamilton has had to fight for every point he can get.
Giving some insight into what exactly went wrong in their car development, the team's technical director Mike Elliott pointed out a key error they made. They have known about it "for a while", he told the Beyond the Grid podcast, but have been unable to fix it in time to be competing for race wins this season.
"You look at how we developed the car, and I can point to one moment in time last year where we did something where I think we made a mistake," Elliott said, though he did not specifically say what the error was or in which stage of the design process it was made.
"What you're seeing in terms of performance and the way it swings from race to race as a consequence of that, and that's a mistake we've known about for a while, and something we've been correcting and that's why our performance has gradually got better. But it's not something we can fully correct for a little while yet, and we will do over the winter."
While 2022 has been a season to forget for a team with Mercedes' ambitions, they are more optimistic about what next year may hold. Driver George Russell has already expressed his belief that his team is on the right path towards being able to give him a car in which he can compete for race wins.
"We have a philosophy that we're going to be trying to adopt in our development and I'm very confident that is the correct one," he said. "But equally, it doesn't mean that we can necessarily achieve it. We have a target, and that is a massive positive in itself. We know what we're chasing, we have a clear target we're trying to chase now.
"Can we achieve that? I have every confidence that we can. We obviously don't know how much our rivals are going to improve over this winter, but I definitely have confidence that we will have a more complete car across the circuit range going into 2023."
