Allison looks for Mercedes upgrades to ‘move the dial’

Mercedes will be bringing upgrades for the upcoming trio of Formula 1 races on consecutive weekends that technical director James Allison hopes will help the team close the gap to McLaren.

Oscar Piastri led home a McLaren one-two at the Miami Grand Prix where George Russell finished more than half a minute adrift in third place. While Russell is just six points behind Max Verstappen in the drivers’ standings, he’s now 38 off leader Piastri and Allison says more substantial new parts are set to be brought to the car across Imola, Monaco and Barcelona.

“We have actually been bringing upgrades,” Allison said. “They’re not particularly enormous or sexy, but they’ve been coming in a steady trickle. There’s some that will be more obvious to the outside world in the next handful of races. With a bit of luck, they’ll improve our fortunes.

“We’re a quarter of the way through the season already. It’s been coming at the teams hard and fast. It’s quite difficult to get upgrades to the car when the races are coming at you in this sort of fashion.

“Hopefully, the ones that happen in the next two or three races will move the dial a bit for us. We will also continue to try to work on the tire temperature in the races, that will also improve our fortunes.”

Mercedes’ recent qualifying performance has been strong, with Kimi Antonelli on pole position for the Sprint in Miami and then just 0.067s away from pole again for the grand prix, so Allison believes understanding how to keep tire temperatures under control across a race distance could provide the biggest step forward for the team.

“Because we’ve been pretty strong in qualifying for the first several races, I think we can expect to have an OK shout of getting the car reasonably well up the grid in qualifying,” he said. “With a bit of luck, the upgrades might make that a bit better still. But the main thing we’ll be focusing on is trying to get that race pace under control, trying to make sure that we deliver on the promise of our Saturdays on the Sunday.

“The majority of that will be about controlling the temperature of those tires and making sure the car can therefore use the pace that’s in it.”