Mercedes won’t impose any sort of team orders to favour Kimi Antonelli in the Drivers’ Championship, with the team outlining its core principle for the second half of the season.
Antonelli is the leading prospect for Mercedes to clinch the Drivers’ Championship in his second year in Formula 1, with the 19-year-old 50 points clear of Lewis Hamilton and 59 points clear of George Russell.
Mercedes rule out Kimi Antonelli team orders
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With Antonelli building his big lead through the first half of the season, despite suffering misfortunes such as a technical failure in Spain and wayward aero pieces at Silverstone, the momentum is on the teenager’s side as the sport enters a mandatory two-week shutdown.
Mercedes has been the team to beat so far, with Ferrari and McLaren managing three victories between them to ensure the Brackley-based squad hasn’t quite achieved a full clean sweep.
But the competitiveness of the frontrunning teams has closed since the start of the year, with a once-dominant Mercedes now having to dig deeper to come out on top, with the Hungarian Grand Prix marking the first race weekend in which Mercedes never looked to have the pace to win, as McLaren surged to control the race.
In the absence of any clear rival team, allowing Antonelli and Russell to battle for victories is an easy decision to make. But, with Mercedes now coming under increased pressure to achieve victories, might Toto Wolff’s squad elect to change tack and ringfence an Antonelli title victory and instruct Russell to fall in line to help protect the Italian’s lead?
After the Belgian Grand Prix, Wolff told PlanetF1.com that the team won’t look to influence the finishing order of the two Mercedes cars and, in a mid-season review, deputy team principal Bradley Lord has expanded on the topic.
Speaking to PlanetF1.com and other select media, Lord emphasised Wolff’s point by saying, “The simple principle is, if a Mercedes can win the race, a Mercedes must win the race, and that’s what comes first. The team comes first, and the Constructors’ Championship is the team’s primary focus and primary objective.”
With Russell having started the season as the title favourite, only for Antonelli’s relentless form to repaint that picture in his favour, Lord said the fact there’s still half a season to go means it’s far too early to start thinking about team orders. Given the vagaries of form and the power of momentum, it’s worth remembering that Oscar Piastri had a sizeable lead of 34 points over Lando Norris with nine races to go last year, and 104 over Max Verstappen – only to lose out to both of them by season end.
“We’ve seen the fight swing, sort of all the way out to the point where I think all of you know it was being written that there was only one possible winner of the championship, and then, in the space of three races, we’ve seen that swing completely the other way as well,” Lord said of this year’s title battle.
“We’re at the halfway stage, and it’s far too early to even be thinking like that. We’re not focused on the ‘what if?’ scenario.
“We want to win both championships, absolutely, and we’ll give ourselves the best chance of doing that by getting two cars to the finish as often as possible in the highest possible positions that we can, which is what we’ve failed to do at every single race so far this year.”
With reliability issues having reared up on both cars in the first half, as battery issues eliminated Russell in Canada and Antonelli in Spain before Russell’s recent technical issues that have had an effect on his straight-line performance, Lord said the key target for Mercedes now is merely ensuring uniform reliability across both cars.
“So that’s the focus: cars reliable, keep the cars fast, and then enable the drivers to keep it their best shot for winning the Drivers’ Championship,” he said.
“But as I say, that core principle: if a Mercedes can win, a Mercedes must win, and we don’t mind which of the two cars it is, and we will do what we need to do in order to ensure that the quickest of those cars on any given Sunday can do that. That’s the priority for us.”
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Hungary aside, Mercedes’ contention for the victory at each race weekend has been a source of pride for Lord, who revealed the team had not expected to be in such a commanding position by the halfway point of the season.
But, rather than focusing on that achievement, the feeling within Brackley is that there have been opportunities missed – an attitude symptomatic of any winning organisation.
“It’s easy to use words like dominant, but I think, throughout the first part of the season, we’ve had a slender advantage at most races. Not always to the same team,” he said.
“I think the real source of satisfaction is that we’ve been up there and competitive at every type of circuit in every type of condition. That gap has waxed and waned a little bit, but we’ve been able to be there and fighting.
“We would have been capable of winning each of the 10 races, although it hasn’t fallen that way owing to reliability issues and sometimes how we as the team manage the battle between the drivers as well.
“But overall, we certainly didn’t go into Melbourne thinking that we’d be sitting at the summer break with that sort of percentage of races won. To be honest, internally, I think the bigger focus is the 100 or so points that we can tot up and say that we’ve left those on the table.
“That’s the feeling; it’s one of opportunity missed. How can we get on top of the one-car finishes that we’ve had to make them into two-car finishes, reliably?
“Because if we can do that, then we should be in a stronger position in the championship in that regard, and that’s got to be the target for after the summer break.”
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