Allison: "We wanted to take a number of new directions"

Mercedes Technical Director James Allison is convinced that Mercedes will continue to win as long as the team does not fall prey to its own complacency. The Brit explains how the team encourages itself to improve each season.

Success stories

Mercedes won the constructors' championship at Imola for the seventh time in a row thanks to a one-two from Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas. The team is not thinking of stopping yet. Never before has a team been able to become champion seven times in a row.

"Normally, success stories don't end with the upcoming competition. It is more often the case that the team itself loses its lead," Allison says in F1-TV Tech Talk. "It stops recognising the things that made it strong in the past and can become a victim of its own complacency."

Breaking new ground

According to Allison, Mercedes has always tried to counter this risk. For example, the engineer says that the W11 of 2020 is a lot different from its predecessor. "There were no major rule changes, so we could have gone further in the same way. But we decided to go against it, we wanted to take a number of new directions," says the Brit.

"The engineers had a difficult time last season when they were told that their power source was no longer the best in the field. I think that gave them the incentive to improve it in every nook and cranny, even la has remained largely stable since 2014," concludes Allison.