Mercedes unveils 2025 W16 car ahead of Bahrain F1 testing

The Mercedes Formula 1 team has taken the covers off its 2025 car, the W16.

Like its rival teams Mercedes had already revealed the 2025 livery at last week’s F175 launch event in London, using an older model. Now it has unveiled the launch spec of the W16 car that its drivers George Russell and debutant Andrea Kimi Antonelli will contest the 2025 season with.

With the W16, Mercedes is aiming to make fundamental changes to its lineage of ground-effect cars that have proven very hard to get in the optimal set-up window, and have seen dramatic performance swings from circuit to circuit.

Russell and Lewis Hamilton managed to win two races apiece across 2024, including a dominant one-two in Las Vegas, but at other times they found the W15 much less competitive and complaint, and tricky to balance.

That meant over the balance of the season Mercedes struggled to keep up with its fellow frontrunners and finished fourth in the constructors’ standings, behind McLaren, Ferrari and Red Bull.

Russell is now the de facto team leader at the Silver Arrows after Hamilton’s departure for Ferrari. At just 18, long-time Mercedes protege Antonelli will become the youngest-ever driver at the squad, with the Italian having been fast-tracked through its junior programme to fill Hamilton’s vacant seat.

“It’s going to be a significant change this year,” Russell said. “To be honest, we say every year we’ve uncovered a problem, we’ve solved it, and it’s created a new one.

“We’ve probably been a lot more disciplined with every change that we’ve made, and being more thorough than ever in terms of the simulator running, just to ensure we’re not going to fall into a new trap.

“So far, it’s a reasonable step. It’s going to be quite an interesting season with how people deploy the resource between 2025 and 2026.”

The team explained it has changed “every aerodynamic surface” of the car for 2025, as well as designing a new front suspension.

Technical director James Allison added: “Our primary focus has been on dialling out the W15’s slight reluctance to turn in slow corners, along with the imbalance in tyre temperatures that made the car inconsistent from session to session.”

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