As Motorsport.com reports, Mercedes technical director James Allison has confessed that the team's late-season development path actively hampered the W17's driveability. While Mercedes stormed out of the gates in 2026 to secure both the drivers' and constructors' championships, the performance gap to the rest of the grid has visibly shrunk as the season nears its conclusion.
Speaking on the NU Silver Arrows Radio Show, Allison pointed directly to the team's final major aerodynamic package as the source of unexpected difficulties. While discussing the shrinking gap to the competition, he detailed how the new parts introduced unpredictable side effects rather than a pure step forward in lap time.
We were also probably the only car on the weight limit at the start of the year,
"Our final step of performance, our so-called 'Update 18', the thing we brought to the Sepang track and then followed up with the front wing in America... it has given us more downforce, but it has made the car more of a handful," Allison admitted. He further explained that the new components introduced areas where performance was unexpectedly subtracted.
Allison's candid admission regarding 'Update 18' also shed light on why the W17 looked so untouchable during the opening rounds of the championship. For the 2026 regulations, the FIA mandated a sweeping 30-kilogram weight reduction across the grid, dropping the minimum chassis weight to just 768 kilograms. While other constructors struggled to shed the mass, Mercedes nailed the engineering target immediately.
"We were also probably the only car on the weight limit at the start of the year," Allison revealed. "All the folk we were competing with in the championship had a bit of timber to shift, and that was lap time that came to them that wasn't available to us because we were already skinny and on the limit with the weight."
As rival teams eventually lost their excess weight as the season progressed, the field naturally compressed. That convergence was only exacerbated by Mercedes' flawed 'Update 18', leaving the W17 significantly harder to extract pace from as the year drew to a close.
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