A nightmare Sunday for Mercedes in Melbourne
With a double retirement for its drivers Lewis Hamilton and George Russell, the Star brand experienced hell in Australia and does not seem to be able to climb back up the hierarchy in the short term.
How far away is the time when the silver arrows crushed the competition. How far away is the time when Mercedes was an infernal machine, finely tuned to perfection, and no grain of sand could come and jam the gears. Since 2022 and the introduction of the ground effect single-seater regulations, the team based in Brackley has been plunged into a crisis from which it is struggling to emerge.
The W13 and W14 from the two previous seasons could not compete for victories on a regular basis but still allowed Lewis Hamilton and George Russell to climb several podiums, and even the youngest of the two Englishmen to reach the highest step once. The situation has changed in 2024. The engineers of the team led by Toto Wolff cannot find the right settings for the W15 and the two cars more often struggle for the last places in the Top 10 with Aston Martin, than for the podiums with Ferrari and McLaren.
In Melbourne, Hamilton failed to qualify for Q3 while George Russell could not hope for better than seventh place on the grid behind the two Red Bulls, the two Ferraris, and the two McLarens. The race did not go much better for the seven-time world champion who saw, or rather heard, his engine give up the ghost as early as the 17th lap. A sad end to the day for someone who has only eight points in the championship after three races.
Always struggling for points, Russell, for his part, had a solid race but seemed to plateau in his fight for a Top 5. In Fernando Alonso’s exhaust in the final laps to finish 6th, the number 63 Mercedes was a victim of a too early braking from the Spaniard’s Aston Martin, sending him into the wall and then lying in the middle of the track.
This is how the black weekend of the silver arrows in Australia ended. Two Mercedes out of the points, it hadn’t happened since the Azerbaijan Grand Prix in 2021. We have to go even further back to find evidence of a double retirement for the gray cars. It was in Austria in 2018, during the era of Stuttgart firm’s undisputed dominance in Formula 1.
“This race has been difficult for us,” declared George Russell after his accident. “We lacked speed. We will have to work if we want to catch up with those ahead of us.”
His teammate was hardly more enthusiastic: « It’s the worst start to a season in my career. It’s worse than 2022 and 2023 and even worse than 2009,” analyzed Hamilton, whose dreams of an eighth title with Mercedes are dwindling race after race.
With 26 points, Mercedes is currently 4th in the constructors’ championship, with just one point ahead of Aston Martin and already far behind the leading duo of Red Bull and Ferrari.
