Why Mercedes and Red Bull are starting from a different footing for 2025

The Mercedes W15 proved to be a decidedly more composed and faster car than its predecessors, the clumsy and unstable W13 and W14 of the previous two years, but it still has some drawbacks that the Brackley team apparently consider quite significant.

These disadvantages have to do with the instability of tire management – especially in very hot races – and the sensitivity of the car to the slightest changes in settings and conditions. It is for these reasons that the performance of Lewis Hamilton and George Russell fluctuates so strongly from race to race, or even from GP testing.

So apparently these problems are so significant and intractable that the team’s business director of engineering, Andrew Sovlin, says the 2025 Mercedes W16 will be a vastly different car than this year’s W15.

“We haven’t decided yet if we will keep the same chassis, or the same gearbox. Reality says you probably can’t change everything.” said the Briton.

“We are, right now, in the phase where we are trying to assess the value of what we decide to spend in light of the budget limit. However, aerodynamically, I believe our car (for 2025), like most teams, will be an evolution of this year’s.

There will be significant changes (to our car), but you don’t want to change the architecture of the car and be surprised in the wind tunnel, then run to recover. I don’t think many people will do that.”added Shovlin.

RBR: The evolution of the RB20
At the same time, while Sovlin announced “significant changes” for the Mercedes W15, Red Bull Racing made it clear that the 2025 RB21 will not change that much from this year’s RB20. It will simply be an “evolution” of it.

One would expect with this year’s decline in the champion’s performance that the opposite would be true. But RBR’s confirmation that it will stick with the RB20’s design philosophy is a very important indication of two things.

The first is that the champion believes that it has found sufficient solutions for the problems it faced with this year’s RB20 upgrade, from June onwards. The second is that he believes that by solving these problems, the RB20 has a lot of room for development – enough to continue to develop through 2025.

“In this job you can’t predict far into the future” said team manager Christian Horner. “A long period in F1 it’s two and a half months, and basically what we learn this year relates to next year.

So, next year’s car will be an evolution of this year’s. There are a lot of parts from last year’s car that have been carried over to this year’s car because with the budget limit there’s no point in making a big change if it’s not going to give you a significant improvement in (the car’s) performance.”continued the Briton.

Of course, RBR’s choice not to change much in the RB21 may be due to other factors as well. To the fact that it prefers to devote from the beginning of 2025 its attention and infrastructure to the all-new 2026 car and the first engine of its own construction in history, or to the fact that its wind tunnel is outdated and does not want to have the same problems – of correlating the data with the track- he had this year.

“We always knew the limitations of the wind tunnel,” Horner admitted. “But I think that by starting to push the aerodynamics of these cars, when the differences were minimized, the limitations started to appear.

So we got to the point where we said we have to go ahead (with the construction of the new wind tunnel), and we have to go ahead now, because according to the regulations and within the budget limit the wind tunnel we’re operating now is grossly inadequate.”Horner concluded.

RBR has started construction on its advanced, brand new wind tunnel in Milton Keynes, but it won’t be ready until 2026. Which means it enters the new 2026 regulations with the disadvantage of a wind tunnel that Horner himself has described as “cold war legacy”.