Official: Mercedes unveils its 2025 car, the W16!

Like rival teams, Mercedes unveiled its 2025 livery on an older model at the F1 75 launch event in London last week, but the team has now revealed the launch version of the W16 that will be used throughout the season.

With the W16, Mercedes aims to make radical changes to its ground-effect vehicle design, which has been struggling in recent years. The latest generation of Mercedes cars had a hard time reaching the ideal tuning window and experienced large performance fluctuations from track to track.

George Russell and Lewis Hamilton have brought Mercedes four wins in total in the 2024 season. They particularly stood out with a dominant double victory at the Las Vegas Grand Prix. However, in other races the W15 car has been quite unbalanced and far from competitive.

Having been inconsistent throughout the season, Mercedes fell behind in the championship battle, finishing fourth behind McLaren, Ferrari and Red Bull.

With Lewis Hamilton moving to Ferrari, George Russell has now become the lead driver at Mercedes.

The team's other driver, Andrea Kimi Antonelli, is only 18 years old and stands out as the youngest driver in Mercedes history. The young Italian talent has made a rapid rise through Mercedes' young driver program and has taken over the seat vacated by Hamilton.

Russell said he was hopeful about Mercedes' changes for 2025:

"This year is going to be a big change. Frankly, every year we think we've solved a problem, but a new problem arises."

“This time, we were much more disciplined about every change we made and conducted simulator studies more meticulously than ever to avoid making previous mistakes.”

“We have made reasonable progress so far. We have an interesting season ahead of us in terms of how resources are allocated between 2025 and 2026.”

Mercedes will hold a filming day with the W16 at the Bahrain Circuit on Tuesday ahead of the pre-season test at the same venue from February 26-28.