Mercedes revival rooted in painful F1 reality check

Mercedes has won the first three races of the 2026 Formula 1 season, and former race engineer Rob Smedley said that return to the front was built on the painful lessons of the team’s slump under the previous rules cycle.

After dominating the early turbo-hybrid era, Mercedes spent much of 2022 through 2025 struggling to match that level of consistent front-running pace. Speaking on the High Performance Podcast, Smedley argued the team’s resurgence was not accidental but the product of a difficult reset forced on it by those years in the wilderness.

He said part of the decline came from the mindset created by prolonged success. “Towards the end, there was perhaps a little bit of self-assuredness there in Mercedes that didn't need to be there,” Smedley said. “They'd won all these world championships.” He compared it to situations he had seen before, warning that once a team starts to believe it can “dominate anything,” “that's when it gets really dangerous.”

The ground-effect era then exposed Mercedes hard. The team was hit by major problems including porpoising and struggled to unlock the aerodynamic potential of its car, while rivals moved ahead. Smedley’s view was blunt: “I think a period of - and I know they won't mind me saying this - getting your ass kicked does you the world of good.”

For him, the key shift was psychological as much as technical. “You think you are the kings of the world and you're going to dominate this sport forever,” Smedley said, before adding that a fallow period “gives you a lot of humility.” That, he said, resets the baseline inside a team: “feet on the ground, humility, heads down, start working.”

Smedley’s argument is that Mercedes carried those lessons into the 2026 regulation change and finally turned adversity into an advantage. In his view, the team’s restored consistency and three wins from three races are the result of that deeper change in culture, not just a fast start to a new era.