A front-row lockout converted into an easy one-two finish — Mercedes had the São Paulo Grand Prix so firmly in its grasp that it felt like we were back in the mid-2020s, as though this season had never really happened.

The only difference was the scale of the celebrations, and not just in acknowledgment of George Russell’s long-awaited first victory.

It had been more than 11 months since Mercedes last won a race and more than two years since its cars finished first and second.

Whereas once Mercedes wins and one-twos were de rigueur, for most of this year they’ve been unimaginable in all but the most unusual circumstances.

“I definitely have in the past experienced us having a one-two, and I think because at stages it was more regular, it almost loses that specialness,” Lewis Hamilton admitted from second place. “To have had this drought and this period of time and to finally get back there, I think it’s a wonderful achievement for everybody.”

But it’s not simply the fact Mercedes had fallen off the horse that makes this victory so remarkable. It’s the time frame and scale of its recovery.

The season is so long that it’s become easy to forget just how bad the W13 was at the start of the year.

The unique no-sidepod car looked like it had the potential to be a world-beater but turned out to have some serious and intractable problems.

In Bahrain the fastest Mercedes was 0.68 seconds off the pace — and that was the closest the car got to pole for the first quarter of the season. Just three rounds later, in Imola, neither Mercedes cracked Q3. Russell was faster than Hamilton but was still a whopping 1.9 seconds adrift.

“We were fighting with Alfa Romeo and Haas at the start of the season and well over a second at points behind Ferrari, who were looking the most dominant team at the time,” Russell said.

“I’m so proud of the whole team. The progress we’ve made since the start of the year is just unbelievable.”

But now for the important question is: is Mercedes really back, or is this just a blip?

And what does this mean for the prospects of a more competitive championship in 2023?

 

THE PROGRESS IS REAL

Mercedes’s entire year has been coloured not just by its recalcitrant car but by the fact it realised it had problems only in the final days of testing, just a week before the first race.

It threw the development program through a loop that took months to recover from.

It took until the Spanish Grand Prix at the end of May for Mercedes to bring its first major upgrade package aimed at addressing what it thought was the root cause of its problems: the aerodynamic porpoising.

The team had its most competitive showing to date at the technically balanced and smooth Circuit de Barcelona-Catalunya, but it was a false dawn. Other bumpier and more demanding circuits revealed the W13 also had fundamental ride problems — ride problems so bad that at some circuits both drivers were in physical pain after the race.

Several further rounds of upgrades aimed to solve this and other problems, but inevitably the ambitious car design threw up more issues.

“For a long, long period of time we [couldn’t] really, truly understand what the problem was or how to fix it,” Hamilton said. “It was difficult, because we kept trying and trying and trying, and every time something new came we still had the problems we had.”

Another upgrade arrived in Spa, though its effectiveness was masked by Belgium, Italy and Japan punishing the car’s fundamentally high level of drag.

But by then the team suspected it was finally grasping the worst of its issues, and one final major upgrade was installed on the car at the United States.

The car hasn’t been off the podium since, and Mercedes has been within reach of victory at all three races between then and now.

A look at the team’s qualifying performances through the year is revealing.

It was on average 1.067 seconds off pole before the Spanish Grand Prix upgrade. That margin improved a little after that update, but the team remained roughly 0.8 seconds adrift for the next six months.

It took the Austin-spec car to make any significant gains.

Mercedes gap to pole

Before Spain upgrade: 1.067 seconds

Between Spain and Hungary: 0.835 seconds

Between Belgium and Japan: 0.904 seconds

Since USA upgrade: 0.427 seconds

Mercedes average highest finish

Before Spain upgrade: 4.0

Between Spain and Hungary: 3.0

Between Belgium and Japan: 4.6

Since USA upgrade: 1.7

“We lost so much time trying to solve the porpoising issues, and that really hurt our development,” Russell explained. “I think that’s why we’re seeing such a jump in performance in these past eight races — it’s because we’re no longer focusing on the porpoising and we’re now focused on bringing performance.”

BUT THERE’S A CATCH

All that said, 0.4 seconds is still a considerable margin, and while its finishing positions have also improved, Ferrari’s lack of late-season progress — and the Italian team’s dreadful Mexico City performance — has favourably skewed this metric.

And while Mercedes was genuinely quick in Brazil, Russell’s win was more comfortable than it should have been.

Early in the race Max Verstappen, Charles Leclerc and Hamilton were all involved in early crashes, Carlos Sainz was forced into an extra stop to remove a visor tear-off from a brake duct and Sergio Perez copped a poor first pit stop.

It was only the safety car that bunched up the field and delivered a fighting finish between the two Mercedes drivers.

And while it’s true to say that the Mercedes car pulled away from the field in that final stint — as it did earlier in the race and during the sprint — Sao Paulo wasn’t a clear picture of performance.

The sprint weekend format condenses the three regular practice sessions down into a single hour on Friday afternoon before parc fermé conditions start on Friday evening with qualifying, after which no set-up changes can be made.

It was particularly hard to nail set-up on Friday in Brazil given the cool conditions that precipitated rain later in the day. Saturday was then mild, and Sunday’s race conditions were hot and sunny.

The Mercedes car rolled out looking competitive from the off, but Red Bull Racing struggled with set-up, evident from the way both Verstappen and Perez chewed through their tyres.

“We definitely have taken steps forwards, but it’s almost like the others kind of fell off a little bit this weekend,” Hamilton admitted after the race — though he added that the fact the car worked well immediately in practice was its own sign of progress.

“I think we’re just slowly starting to understand the car more and more and get it working in a sweeter spot,” he said.

Mercedes is quick enough now to win — and comfortably — when Red Bull Racing trip up. That’s definite progress. But on a conventional weekend Mercedes would likely have had significantly more trouble racing for victory.

WHAT ABOUT 2023?

So the reality of Brazil back a bit at the general post-race optimism, but still we return to that impressive rate of progress over the course of the year.

If you were to extrapolate that over the next several months into next season, the team’s pace would eventually intersect with the leaders.

But things are never so simple in Formula 1.

Ferrari boss Mattia Binotto says his team long ago switched focus to 2023 in explaining why Maranello’s challenge has faded so dramatically late this year. Red Bull Racing will obviously have done likewise given its security at the top of the championship.

Mercedes was still upgrading its car as recently as three weeks ago.

That development gap will clearly influence the competitive order early next season.

“We’ve lost eight or 10 months in terms of development because we couldn’t figure out what was wrong,” Mercedes boss Toto Wolff said after the Mexico City Grand Prix, per The Race. “So there’s definitely a challenge, and we are playing the long game here.”

But the rules are largely stable next season, meaning some lessons learnt in 2022 will be applicable in 2023. Some of Mercedes’s recent gains have also been in weight reduction, some of which could be directly transferable to next year’s car.

There are also non-tangible performance gains that will transfer directly to next season, in particular around driveability and ride quality. Both have made it difficult for the drivers to extract the maximum theoretical lap time from the car.

“We really think next year we’re going to have a car that’s characteristics will be feeling nicer, which will give Lewis and I more confidence to push it,” Russell noted.

But the most important gain from 2022 isn’t necessarily where this year’s car ends up. Much more valuable is that the team understands both where it went wrong with this car and, crucially, how to extract performance under this new generation of rules.

Winning in Brazil was important to validate that progress more than it was for the result itself.

“This is a massive boost to the whole team’s morale,” Hamilton said of the one-two finish. “Going into the winter, the team knows that we’re on the right track.

“We know where our North Star is, we know where we need to put all our efforts into this winter.

“And we are still the best team. We will get back to having this more consistently I think next year, and I’m excited for that battle.”

Or, as Wolff more ominously put it, “You can’t judge the team’s performance on a single year [but on] how we’ve been able to win championships over the long term.”

Mercedes isn’t the most successful team of the last decade by accident. Winning the São Paulo Grand Prix isn’t a sign that it’s suddenly back on terms with the leaders, nor is it a guarantee that next year’s car will be a victory contender from the first race.

But it does prove that Mercedes is back on course. It would be surprising if the team wasn’t a more consistently competitive force next year, and it can be only a matter of time before it’s a formidable threat again.

And surely no-one could complain about the prospect of a three-team championship battle in 2023.