Mentality key to Mercedes recovery - Allison

Mercedes needs to ensure it doesn’t lament how far behind Red Bull it has fallen in recent seasons in order to be able to recover as quickly as possible, according to technical director James Allison.Red Bull has dominated the last two years in Formula 1, winning 21 of 22 races in the season just gone while Mercedes failed to win a race for the first time since 2011. Having won the last of its eight consecutive constructors’ championships in 2021, Allison says the team will only face a longer wait to return to competitiveness if it focuses too much on past glories.“I think that as an organization if you have been at the top and you start to fall, there’s two ways of looking at that,” Allison told the Performance People podcast. “There’s a backwards-looking way of lamenting what you once were and sort of going ‘how could this have happened to us?’ … as a keening lament of ‘oh my God, this is all so terrible’ and ‘how could we have fallen so low when we were once so great?!’“If you have that sort of backward-looking mentality it can be quite depressing and likely to prolong the downturn. The sooner, on the other hand, you’re able to say ‘we are where we are, let’s not pretend we are deserving of winning at the moment. Let’s figure out what we need to do so we are deserving of winning at and let’s enjoy that transition from what we deserve to be right now and what we’re going to be in the future.’“The sooner everyone can be on that page, A, the shorter the slump is and B, the more fun it is, because the sense of growing momentum is deeply joyful and the idea that you’re building the things that are going to allow you to walk around the paddock with your chest out at some point in the future, that’s a really energizing thing.“As much as maybe the outside world might imagine this is deeply painful internally, and on one level it is, it’s also really exciting. And a lot of whether it’s depressing or exciting is how you choose to look at it.”Whether Mercedes can be a winning force again in 2024 is something Allison is unsure of, but he says being in title contention is the target that the team has set itself despite the gap to Red Bull over the past two years.“I hope that we have put in place enough of a program of work that we have put ourselves in with a shout to be back to winning ways – does that mean winning a race does that mean winning a championship? In my head it’s only ever about championships. That’s what Formula 1 is, it’s a constructors’ and a drivers’ championship. So I hope that we will have done enough to give ourselves a shout of being in a championship fight in both championships.“If you look at the long march of F1 history, then the stats are against us. Teams do not bounce back from slipping from their previous peak in the length of time we have set ourselves but we have nevertheless set a pretty ambitious program.“We have quite a lot of strength in depth here and we’ve made quite a lot of progress with next year’s car. Whether it proves sufficient enough, only time will tell, but that’s what I’m hoping for us and I know that all my colleagues and teammates around me will be hoping for the same.”