In 2024, few teams performed as well in cooler conditions as Mercedes — but with F1 2025 testing getting underway in an unusually chilly Bahrain climate, the team hasn’t been quite as dominant as expected.

According to Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff, it’s time to get “a bit worried,” though there are still many unknown factors and variables at play.

Toto Wolff: “We should be two seconds quicker than everybody else!”
Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

Mercedes team boss Toto Wolff is a little perplexed. Pre-season testing for the F1 2025 season has begun in Bahrain, and with the location boasting cool temperatures, the Brackley-based team should, in theory, be topping the charts.

After all, in 2024, cool weather was where Mercedes shone: In Las Vegas, Spa, and Silverstone, the Silver Arrows simply seemed to have solved the icy puzzle with far more ease than their competitors.

Thus far in Bahrain, that hasn’t been the case.

On Wednesday, during the first bout of testing, George Russell set a quickest lap time of 1:30.587, good enough for second on the timing charts, while rookie Kimi Antonelli was the seventh-quickest driver of the day, with a time of 1:31.428.

In the second day of testing, Russell dropped down to fourth in the standings, while Antonelli moved up to fifth.

Of course, testing doesn’t reveal all the details of a car’s performance in competition, but Toto Wolff admitted that he’s “a bit worried at the moment because that should be conditions where we should be two seconds quicker than everybody else, which was the only highlight last year in terms of performance in Las Vegas, and we are not.

“So either we’ve remedied the problem and we are more balanced through all the climate conditions, or not.”

Wolff admitted that the lack of expected performance could be due to taking a wrong turn in testing.

“I think we, you know, sometimes take junctions that go in the wrong direction,” he said in a press conference held in Bahrain.

“Maybe yesterday, we tried something in the afternoon that didn’t function. It wasn’t so good.”

Per the Mercedes boss, the goal this year has been to build “a car that gives more confidence” — something that was seriously lacking in 2024 as drivers Russell and Lewis Hamilton lamented a chronic lack of balance.

Wolff believes that the Mercedes W16 “seems to be a tiny step ahead” of last year’s car, “but like all of you said, we have no idea about fuel loads.

“Yesterday, [Lando] Norris was on a different planet. Very, very good.

“Lewis this morning, [Carlos] Sainz on the C2, very impressive.

“So you really have no idea. And the condition are really totally not representative.”

Just one more day of testing separates the Formula 1 field from the 2025 season opener in Australia, which means the pressure is on to find some answers about Mercedes’ performance.