James Allison has admitted that the Mercedes W15’s performance at the Las Vegas Grand Prix was partly “boring”, with the team not expecting such a display of dominance.
Despite an inconsistent second half of the season, the W15 emerged as the best at Vegas, with George Russell dominating from pole position to claim a third career victory.
Lewis Hamilton, meanwhile, recovered from a disappointing 10th place finish in qualifying to seal Mercedes F1’s first double since the 2022 Brazilian Grand Prix.
Russell admitted Mercedes’ dominance in Vegas came as a real surprise, saying: “I don’t know how we got so fast, but I’m riding this wave right now.”
Hamilton added that “Mercedes doesn’t know why we were so fast”.
Allison, technical director of Mercedes F1, therefore admits that it is boring.
“My first words at the factory on Monday were ‘it was brilliant, exhilarating, but also boring’. Boring because we didn’t anticipate the pace we had this weekend.”
“And one of the main things about being an engineer is trying to understand what’s going on with a car, trying to make sure that you understand it and that you can optimize it, and that involves to be able to predict it.”
“We certainly didn’t expect such a dominant performance. There could be many, many reasons for this.”
“We’ve already mentioned the track temperature, an unusually cold environment, a desert race in winter in Las Vegas, but there’s more to it than that.”
“I think the key thing for us is to explore the many possible explanations over the coming week to see if we can turn this discomfort into some degree of understanding and then use it to our advantage.”
