Mercedes chief warns no ‘return to business’ ahead of 2026 regulation changes
Andrew Shovlin has suggested a regulation change does not guarantee Mercedes success.
Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin said the team are looking forward to the “fresh challenge” of a new regulation cycle but are not kidding themselves that it will be a guaranteed “return to business.”
After dominating the sport for a number of years, Mercedes experienced a sharp drop off in the ground effect era, failing to win the title and realistically not even being a challenger.
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While two P2s, a P3 and a P4 will not look so bad in the history books, the ground effect era is undoubtedly Mercedes’ worst in Formula 1 as the team failed to get a hold of the regulations in the same way the likes of Red Bull and latterly McLaren did.
2026 and another change to the regulations brings with it a clean slate and a chance for all 11 teams to move themselves up the order but for Mercedes, it is perhaps more serious than most if it wants to return to its former Championship contender status.
Shovlin, who has been with the team since its inception and at Brawn GP and Honda before that, was looking forward to a “fresh challenge”, but said there was not a “shred of expectation” that the new rules will necessarily suit Mercedes’ skillset.
“We’re looking forward to a fresh challenge,” he said. “We started these rules on the back foot, and we’ve learned a lot during them, but it’s fair to say that they haven’t suited us like the previous ones did.
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“There isn’t a shred of expectation in our team that the new regulations will miraculously suit us more than the others, because they’re a bit more similar to what we had in 2020, 2021. We’re more just looking at it as a completely fresh challenge.”
On the 2026 regulation changes, which will see lighter and smaller cars with a power unit that has 300% the times of electrical power, Shovlin believes the challenge is being the best across a number of different factors and the team that does that will have the most success.
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“There’s a lot of areas that the teams are going to be competing in terms of performance across, perhaps more than we’ve ever had.
“We need to make sure that we’re better than anyone else at that challenge. But as I said, there’s no illusion within the team that these rules will be a return to business as usual for Mercedes.
“We’re going to have to work for it if we want to win.”
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