Allison to remain at Mercedes on long-term deal

Mercedes technical director James Allison has signed a new “long-term” contract to commit his future to the team into Formula One’s next set of technical regulations in 2026.

The deal follows news earlier this week that team principal Toto Wolff has signed a deal to remain in his role until the end of the 2026 season at the very least, strengthening the leadership position of the former champions.

“Put simply, he is the most impressive technical leader in our sport,” Wolff said of Allison. “His gladiator spirit, along with his knowledge, experience, and determination, make him second-to-none.

“Since joining in 2017, he has been a key ally and sparring partner for me personally. We can challenge each other openly and honestly; an embodiment of the ‘tough love’ culture of the team that is vital in helping us all perform at our very best. Most importantly though, James is a true friend you can rely on, not only in times of success but in difficult moments too.”

Allison’s news comes on the dawn of a new Formula One season, with Mercedes looking to return to winning ways after scoring just one race victory in the last two seasons.

Prior to the introduction of the current set of regulations in 2022, the team won eight constructors’ championships in a row in an unprecedented run of dominance.

In 2021, as the team’s winning period was drawing to a close, Allison took a less hands-on role when he was appointed chief technical officer while Mike Elliott took on the position of technical director.

Following the team’s struggles in 2022 and early 2023, Elliott and Allison swapped positions to increase Allison’s involvement in frontline technical decisions before Elliott left the company at the end of the season.

Allison said the challenge his team now faces in catching up with a Red Bull team that won 21 of 22 races last year is one of the key reasons he wants to remain in his role.

“It actually is lots of fun!” he told journalists via a video call. “It isn’t as much fun as winning, that’s definitely true. But you have to sort of love the whole of the sport and the whole of the sport involves taking your licks when you haven’t done a good enough job.

“I think one of the things to admire about Red Bull’s current performance is that they stuck gamely to their task in quite a long period in the wilderness and are now enjoying the fruits of that well-placed labor. And it’s far from unenjoyable being in that position, as long as the team is collectively confident that it’s making the right moves to try to reestablish itself as a force to be reckoned with.

“There’s loads and loads of fun to be had in that. it’s not expected to be linear or anything, it’s always a roller coaster of getting your hopes up, being slapped down and hit by the racing gods and then gathering your skirts again to have another push. And I hope that that journey upwards is steep and strong and secure. But it will be great fun trying to drive it at whatever pace we can to give our rivals a good old fight.”

Catching Red Bull

Mercedes will launch its new car on February 14 ahead of a three-day preseason test in Bahrain from February 21 and the first race of the season on March 2.

Asked if his team was in a place where it could realistically challenge Red Bull this year, Allison said: “I think Toto drew the comparison between climbing Everest and the challenge we have in front of us. And I think that’s fairly apt comparison, because Everest is the sternest of challenges, but it is nevertheless, something that is possible to do.

“And I think that’s how we’re taking this as something which is where we are, absolutely a challenger rather than a favourite. But nevertheless, we hope we’ve done a good job with the new car, we hope we’ve addressed some of the shortcomings that were so publicly on display with it last year.

“And there is also just a little bit that nestles in the back of our heads, which is that the rules themselves have a much more clear upper bound to them in the amount of lap time these cars are capable of producing. A much more clear upper bound to them than the older generation of cars, which the more love you gave them and the more labor you put into them, the faster they got seemingly without end.

“I think if you look at last year, you see, from the start of the season, to the end of the season – although Red Bull’s dominance was near complete, and they didn’t look vulnerable even to the last race of the year – if you look at the bigger picture, this is a grid that is gradually compressing, and the all the cars in Q1 were sort of squashed down within one second of each other. And that’s no coincidence.

“It’s a trend that has happened from 2022, continued in 2023, and I think will continue to show itself in 2024, because the gains are getting more and more asymptotic. And then I think that in addition to us I hope having worked well, my guess is it’s going to be relatively busier near the top of the grid this time round and last.

“And there, if we are good enough to be in that fight, then operational things – driver excellence, the reliability of the car, the skill of the crews that service it – all of those things start to potentially become the differentiating factors and hopefully there too we’ve given a good wash and brush up to performances that were sometimes less than stellar last year.”

Hopes for the new car

Although the new Mercedes car — named the W15 — has yet to hit the track, it has run in the virtual world in the team’s driver-in-loop simulator.

Allison said many of the issues that hampered the drivers last year appear to have been addressed, but he stopped short of being bullish about the car’s potential competitiveness until he has seen what rival teams have produced.

“It’s impossible at this time of year to be anything other than apprehensive, coupled with excited, coupled with frightened… it’s just those are always the emotions that you feel and I would imagine that even in Red Bull after a year of such good performance, they will not be sleeping easy in their beds either because no one knows what everyone else will deliver.

“However, what we do have some hope for is that some of the more spiteful characteristics of the rear end of our car will be a bit more friendly to us, and the handling of the car a happier thing. That’s all in simulation but nevertheless, we’ve got reasonable grounds to believe that we’ve made some gain there.

“And then on top of that you’ve got all the normal housekeepingy type stuff of just making it lighter, making it more downforcey, and hopefully getting a bit of uplift from the power unit side with the calibration level tinkering that they’re still capable of doing under these current rules.

“So whether it’s enough time will tell, but it’s nevertheless going to be interesting, because we saw some things we knew were problems, we have hypothesized what the reason for those problems were. And we have fixed those reasons. It will be interesting to find out how accurate we’ve been with that diagnosis.”