Lewis Hamilton & Co. Took Fernando Alonso’s Success Personally Before Staging Full-Fledged Comeback

Imagine AlphaTauri outperforming Red Bull. As unlikely as that may be, in the off-chance it does happen, it wouldn’t reflect well on Red Bull, especially considering AlphaTauri is its sister team, a customer of sorts. This is exactly what happened with Lewis Hamilton & Co. at Mercedes this season. Its customer, Aston Martin, was performing better with the same Mercedes engine. Needless to say, the Brackley outfit wasn’t too pleased with the situation and used Aston’s success as inspiration to do better. 

Mercedes started its season on the back foot, just like in 2022. Instead of Ferrari fighting Red Bull at the front, it was Fernando Alonso in his Mercedes-powered Aston Martin raking in the podiums, with Hamilton and Mercedes struggling to get going. While discussing the start of the season, Mercedes’ technical director James Allison said, as quoted by f1maximaal.nl, “We were the fourth [fastest] team at the beginning of the year. Even our customer teams were faster. That was frustrating. Ferrari also beat us.” [Translated by Google]

As Mercedes kept introducing upgrades to the W14 while also having to revamp it entirely before the Monaco GP, the car progressively got better. Considering Mercedes has a strong hold on P2 in the championship without either Hamilton or George Russell in the top three of the Drivers’ Championship, it’s a testament to how much the W14 has improved over the season. Allison added, “Step by step, we are now leaving those teams behind us.”

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While Mercedes has considerably improved, Aston Martin and Alonso seem to have regressed in the latter part of the first half. But that doesn’t mean the Brackley squad hasn’t faced competition from another Mercedes customer while plotting its comeback. Who is it? McLaren. Instead of seeing McLaren as a threat, though, Mercedes has taken inspiration from it.

Lewis Hamilton & Co. learned lessons from McLaren’s turnaround

The 2023 season hasn’t been the best for Mercedes. From how McLaren started the season, it looked as though the Woking team was on the same boat as its engine supplier. While Mercedes did start making a comeback, McLaren’s major upgrade package practically catapulted it from the back of the field to in the mix behind Red Bull—ahead of Mercedes as well. 

While discussing McLaren’s turnaround and Mercedes’ performance in comparison, Toto Wolff said, “You can see how McLaren has leapfrogged everybody else with an update that they didn’t expect to be that powerful. We just need to continue working, chipping away at our understanding and unlocking potential in the car as did Aston Martin over the winter or McLaren during the season. We won’t give up.”

To help with the W14’s improvements, James Allison revealed Mercedes’ tactics, saying, “We take a lot of photos [of other cars] and try to understand what changes from race to race. The interesting and unusual aspect of the McLaren update is that the effect on lap times has been quite strong.”

With Lewis Hamilton & Co. having headed into the summer break with a few problems to address, can it come back stronger in the second half?

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