What "gladiator" Allison's reappointment reveals about Mercedes' F1 shortcomings

On Friday morning, Motorsport.com revealed that Allison is going back to the previous position he held at the team, with his successor Mike Elliott swapping roles in the other direction and becoming the team's chief technical officer.

In several ways, this is starkly new ground for the modern Mercedes squad, in that it finds itself in such dire straits compared to its years as F1's dominator that a major change to its technical staff has been felt necessary and that it hasn't been able to close a gap to a competitor with an initial car design update plan, as it did successfully, for example, in 2021.

And just two weeks ago team boss Toto Wolff was publicly stating that Allison had not returned to directly working on the Mercedes F1 car project from his part-time role as CTO. This also involved working with the America's Cup team established by Mercedes co-owner INEOS.

At the same time, the reshuffle is very Mercedes.

Wolff says it was at Elliott's urging that the change was made. That Elliott felt "with James we have a gladiator on the field and the troops are going to go through the fire for him and with him". There has so far been no official press release message from Mercedes that the change has been made and that is understood to be remaining as the case, which softens the impact for both Elliott and its organisation overall. But the team wanted the news out there in its own way, giving Motorsport.com F1 editor Jonathan Noble an exclusive interview with Wolff to discuss the development.

This is both an attempt at preserving its much-vaunted united team culture and also, apparently, a bid to stoke its fire and revitalise its fortunes in F1 competition.

What cannot be fully known right now is how much Elliott's decision was reached in reaction to the internal pressure at Mercedes that had been building – to recover from being so significantly knocked off its perch at the head of the F1 field by the 2022 rules reset and the return to running ground-effect cars.

Mike Elliott, Technology Director, Mercedes AMG, in the Press Conference

Photo by: FIA Pool

It was always possible that one of the leading teams come 2021's end and the new machines finally being introduced would lose their place. But while Mercedes fell so dramatically with the badly porpoising W13, Red Bull maintained its place at the sharp end and then roared clear once the RB18 and its downwash approach were lightened.

That aerodynamic concept, at full play with the critical suspension and underfloor part designs Red Bull has also nailed, has proved to be the best of the new era. And the team that moved first and so decisively to switch to that path, Aston Martin, has leapt up the order as a result.

By implementing evolutions of their very different 'zeropod' and inwash-sidepoded cars at the start of 2023, Mercedes and Ferrari risked falling into their current positions.

That heaps pressure on top of frustration and actually eventually doubles – in that a wholesale concept change as Mercedes publicly committed to in Bahrain, but had been mulling for a while beforehand, now has to be pulled off successfully.

By apparently deciding not to commit to a concept change before 2024, Ferrari has tripled that burden…

Perhaps the most significant word of Mercedes' carefully curated change with Allison and Elliott is in Wolff's declaration that the change was "very much driven by Mike Elliott owning the process". 'Owning' suggests Elliott reacted to the shortcomings of Mercedes' technical team under his leadership, but the subsequent reaction from Wolff is again very Mercedes.

The axe has not swung for Elliott in the traditional F1 sense as it has for Mattia Binotto at Ferrari and James Key at McLaren. Instead, Wolff has kept Elliott onboard, and his position as a full-time CTO reflects the worth he clearly has to the organisation. Elliott will now address how best to deploy Mercedes' technical resources from an overarching organisation development perspective, with Allison directly working on how to make the W14 and W15 into winning packages.

There is also a secondary revelation from Wolff's words, which sheds light on how F1's other massive rules shake-up – on financial matters – has impacted Mercedes' previously uber-successful design team.

Lewis Hamilton, Mercedes F1 W14

Photo by: Jake Grant / Motorsport Images

This is that chief designer John Owen "became a cost cap administrator", per Wolff, with "a tonne of extra work that comes with it" post-2021. Now, Owen returns to being more focused on car design, with his deputy Giacomo Tortora moved into an engineering director role and helps with cost cap resource division work. This harks back to the time Aldo Costa worked alongside Owen and Allison in that job before he left to run the technical department at Dallara in 2020.

Because major change has happened within Mercedes's technical department through its time heading F1 between 2014 and 2021 – with other engineers being moved into more senior management roles, and perhaps most famously, Allison's predecessor, Paddy Lowe, leaving to join Williams as its technical boss in 2017. Yet then, the then Silver Arrows squad carried on winning.

Things are very different for Allison and Wolff now. It's no coincidence that Aston is doing so well having hired ex-Red Bull aero chief Dan Fallows, but also former Mercedes aero leader up to late 2021, Eric Blandin, as deputy technical director. So, rather than