The rise and fall of Mercedes: How did it dominate F1 and why has the empire collapsed?

The 2023 F1 season saw Mercedes finish the season without a win for the first time since 2011. This was the first time the team had been unable to stand at the top step of the podium in 12 years. It would come as a surprise that not too long ago, the team's lead driver Lewis Hamilton was on his way to winning his eighth world title in the 2021 F1 Abu Dhabi GP.

By a rather cruel twist of fate, the tide of that race turned and since then, it's been a drought when it comes to achieving success for the German team. The regulations changed in 2022 and the F1 world switched to the ground effect era. That era has not worked as well for Mercedes as the previous hybrid era did.

While the team finished the season second in the constructors' championship, the gap to the top is just too far and it's going to take some serious developments and growth over the summer break to challenge for the title next season.

Mercedes joined the sport in 2010 after taking over the Brawn GP from Ross Brawn. It has been part of the sport for more than a decade now and has been a team that witnessed one of the biggest rises and the sharpest falls in recent years.

The team went from winning four races in its first four years to becoming the team that scripted the most dominant era in F1 by winning the constructors' title from 2014-21. The same team has since then fallen from those highs and has won just a single race in the last two seasons.

This begs one important question. How did Mercedes spearhead the most dominant era in F1 and why has the team suffered such a massive decline?

In this feature, we'll go through that journey and uncover what led to the dominance and the subsequent fall.

The rise and fall of Mercedes

Why did it dominate?

When we talk about Mercedes' dominance, the foundation of it was laid down even before Toto Wolff and Lewis Hamilton made their way to the team. Having said that, the year 2014 was the one where the German team usurped Red Bull of all teams to become the benchmark of F1.

At the start of the 2014 F1 season, Red Bull was the championship-winning juggernaut that had dominated the sport from 2010-13. Mercedes turned the formbook on its head with the new regulations and scripted history.

How did it happen? How did the team that debuted in F1 in 2010 become a championship winner in 2014? Let's take a look at how Mercedes achieved this.

Hire someone successful in F1

It all started with Mercedes hiring Ross Brawn to lead the unit. The German brand had taken over the team from Brawn after he had done the unthinkable of winning both championships on debut.

To add to this, Brawn was one of the more respected people in F1 at the time and one of the leaders at Ferrari during the years of dominance. He knew what it takes to build a dominant team and he had already accomplished this with Honda as well before the Japanese Brand pulled the plug on its operations.

The first thing Brawn did was hire his partner in crime at Ferrari, arguably the greatest driver to ever grace F1, Michael Schumacher. The German had retired in 2006 after completing the most successful career in F1. He did have the itch to come back against and at 40-plus years of age what Brawn wanted was someone who could help him build the team and not focus on winning from the very first race.

With the combination of Ross Brawn and Michael Schumacher at the helm, Mercedes had the perfect combination to build the foundations for the team.

Build a super team

What would astound many is the number of key personnel Mercedes had in the team by the time the 2014 season came around. Ross Brawn, with the German brand backing him to the hilt, had recruited a super team that was put in place to build the ultimate championship-winning car.

While Brawn himself left the team pre-2014 and Toto Wolff had taken over, the key personnel that built that championship-winning car included.

• Bob Bell(Spearheaded the end of Ferrari's dominance and won with Renault in 2005-06)
• Aldo Costa(Part of Ferrari's dream team during its dominance)
• Geoff Willis(An understudy of Adrian Newey)
• Mike Elliot(From Lotus, famed for the brilliant aerodynamically efficient cars)
• Andy Cowell(A man with a wealth of knowledge building engines)

These were the technical personnel while you also had people like Niki Lauda as part of the think tank. With the right direction, this team was always going to succeed and it certainly did.

Early shift to focus on the new regulations

Next up was a key decision taken by Brawn when he realized how important a role the power unit was going to play. As a result, Mercedes was arguably the earliest in terms of constructors to begin the work on the V6 Turbo hybrid.

As a result, when the 2014 change of regulations took place, the German team was just too far ahead in terms of its power unit. The power unit was so good that it turned teams like Williams and Force India into podium contenders in the early years of that era.

While every other constructor was caught with its pants down in 2014, the German squad had the best power unit by a country mile and it just made the entire season a site of utter dominance.

Hire an elite driver

The final piece of the puzzle was hiring an elite driver. For every team to have a sustained period of dominance, building the team around an elite driver certainly helps. This was shown in the past by McLaren when it had Alain Prost or Ayrton Senna as the drivers around whom the entire team was built.

For Mercedes, the year was 2012 and Michael Schumacher admitted that the fire was starting to fade for him. He didn't achieve the kind of success that he would have expected and he knew the time was up for him. It was time for the German team to look at one of the elite drivers on the grid as even though Nico Rosberg was a brilliant performer, he was just not on the level of the elite talents.

The 2012 F1 grid had the reigning champion Sebastian Vettel, two-time champion Fernando Alonso, and McLaren superstar Lewis Hamilton as three drivers who were earmarked at the time as the top three talents on the grid.

With Alonso committed to Ferrari, and Vettel winning titles with Red Bull, it was Hamilton who the German team could finally lure into joining the setup and as we can see, it transformed the driver's as well as the team's fate.

In the end, it was the perfect amalgamation of building a super team, getting a jump on the regulations change, and having an elite driver who could extract the maximum from the car which helped Mercedes go on a dominant run from 2014 to 2021.

Next up, why has the same empire just collapsed in the last couple of years? Let's take a look at what led to the downfall of such a dominant team.

Why has it fallen?

Complacency

Lewis Hamilton's remark to the media just before the start of the 2022 F1 regulations was an indication of how highly the team rated itself and the thought of failing had never crossed its mind. Before the start of the season in a press conference, the Mercedes driver said:

"My team does not make mistakes."

It was a reply to the question from the media on how he would tackle a situation where the car is not of championship-winning caliber. By the time the new regulations rolled on, Mercedes had spent the last eight seasons having the fastest car on the grid. Every year for almost a decade, the team did not slip up.

However, there was one problem in all of this. In all these years, the car was so far ahead of everyone else that the team could afford a lackadaisical attitude in some other areas. The pitstop times could be a bit sub-optimal but until they were not sloppy, the team was happy. The strategy might not be the sharpest at the team but up until there weren't any blunders, the car's advantage helped take the team through.

The Mercedes of those years were essentially so dominant that it papered over some of the cracks within the team. This overconfidence meant the team went ahead with a novel no-sidepod car concept that no other team went with.

It was this arrogance that saw the team bring the design again at the start of the 2023 F1 season with the hope that it would work. Mercedes stole the march on everyone in 2014 and while it continued to be brilliant, it did not address some of the issues within the team and when the competition had caught up, the German unit's arrogance meant it couldn't compete.

Red Bull finally addressing its major weakness

One of the major reasons behind the rise of Mercedes was its power unit supremacy. The German team not only had the best power unit in the sport, it was just too far ahead of everyone.

Red Bull, on the other hand, was the team that had dominated the sport until 2013. The Austrian team was blindsided big time by the regulations as the power unit supplier Renault had produced a below-par power unit.

While the French constructor did not produce the best engines in the V8 era as well the gap between the best and the worst power units was not too big. During the hybrid era, however, the gap was massive.

Red Bull could not compete with Mercedes and almost went through a few years of rebuilding period as it got rid of Renault and onboarded Honda as the power unit supplier. The whole debacle has made the Austrian team smarter as well and the team has now created its own powertrain unit to prevent the disaster of the turbo hybrid era ever again.

In addition to all of this though, Red Bull has just levelled up compared to everyone else on the grid. Unlike Mercedes, who benefitted from a dominant car, the Austrian team ticks all the boxes. The car is brilliant, the operations unit is the best and so is the strategy team. To add to this, having Max Verstappen, a once-in-a-generation talent as part of the team has helped massively as well.

Compared to the Mercedes dominance era, the current field has Red Bull firing on all cylinders and the German team appears to have no answers.

Resource drain

You look at the Mercedes lineup right now and you compare it to the team of the past, there are quite a few new names while a lot of the old ones have either left or have been replaced. Andy Cowell, the man behind the groundbreaking V6 Turbo hybrid is now part of Red Bull PowerTrains.

Bob Bell is gone, so is Geoff Willis and Mike Elliot is one of the more recent exits as he departed this season. It's fair to say that attrition is part of any team and this continues to happen as everyone tries to find new challenges but one can't deny the fact that the exit of any key member is surely going to hurt.

James Vowles has left the team early this season. He was someone who was part of the team for a long time. James Allison has only come back this season as well. Mercedes is one team that has gone through a serious resource drain over the years and its impact has surely been there.

What's next?

Now this is the more crucial part about Mercedes and its future. The team finished P2 in the championship this season. It has arguably the best driver lineup on the grid with Lewis Hamilton and George Russell.

The return of James Allision is a confidence boost as well. Ideally, a team that has this much going for it should do well but then we look at the competition and on the other side we have Red Bull with Adrian Newey and Max Verstappen.

Can Mercedes make its way back to the top? It should but looking at the marauding nature of the competition at the top of the championship one would have to measure their words before proclaiming that the German team could be a championship contender next season.

Mercedes is the perfect example of what a team could achieve when everything is meticulously planned and a process is followed. It is also a perfect example of how steep a fall a team could get in F1 if there is a hint of complacency.