James Allison admits flawed “Update 18” made the Mercedes W17 a “handful”
Mercedes stormed out of the gates in 2026, quickly establishing a dominant lead that ultimately secured both the drivers’ and constructors’ championships. But as the season nears its conclusion, the performance gap between the W17 and the rest of the grid has visibly shrunk.
According to Mercedes technical director James Allison, this convergence was not just a natural result of rivals catching up. Speaking on the NU Silver Arrows Radio Show, Allison confessed that Mercedes’ own development path actively hampered the car’s driveability late in the year.
While discussing the shrinking gap to the competition, Allison pointed to the team’s latest major aerodynamic package.
George Russell, Mercedes, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes
Photo by: Colin McMaster / LAT Images via Getty Images
“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.
Rather than delivering a pure step forward in-lap time, the new parts introduced unpredictable side effects.
“It’s got some areas where it has subtracted a bit of performance that we were not expecting,” Allison explained.
The “skinny” weight advantage
Allison’s 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.
Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes
Photo by: Clive Rose / Formula 1 via Getty Images
“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 – an effect exacerbated by Mercedes’ flawed ‘Update 18’, making the W17 significantly harder to extract pace from.
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