Hot on the heels of declaring it was abandoning its current Formula 1 car design concept, there’s another drastic change at Mercedes with James Allison returning to the technical director role in place of his successor Mike Elliott.
The change, revealed by Autosport on Friday morning, is reported to be due to Elliott concluding he is not suited to the role, though he stays with the team as chief technical officer.
Allison’s return happens with Mercedes deep into work on the first round of upgrades it’s bringing to its troubled 2023 car at next month’s Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, but looking a long way from championship-challenging form even despite a more encouraging race in Australia.
Here are our writers’ initial takes on what it means for Mercedes and its efforts to get back to the front of F1.
SWIFT MOVES TO CHANGE CONCEPT WERE TELLING
Scott Mitchell-Malm
Mike Elliott put in a valiant effort as the vocal proponent and then defender of the Mercedes car designs that have proven so flawed in this new ruleset.
But there were some signs of the narrative turning against him – mainly just in how he viewed the situation versus how it played out in reality, rather than Mercedes directly undermining him or setting him up for a fall.
As technical director, Elliott became well versed in dealing with questions about the car concept and the sidepod design that came to (inaccurately or not) represent it. He was publicly sticking up for his team’s choices for a long time.
It continued until 24 hours before the first qualifying session of the season in Bahrain – a session that prompted team boss Toto Wolff to quickly and emphatically denounce the car concept as wrong. Then more comments gradually emerged about other design directions already being explored for a while.
It felt as though Elliott was increasingly in the minority in believing in the concept Mercedes is abandoning, but either had the authority or the mandate/backing from the team to plough on because of the faith he had.
The fact is, Mercedes decided weeks back to change its design approach and Elliott, retained as technical director, would have fed into that process. So, he’s not buried his head in the sand permanently and insisted he is right, and his will be done.
Maybe it was a case of giving him more chance with the W14 to prove this design direction had the necessary potential – and then the 2023 season immediately provided enough evidence to the contrary.
Elliott just backed the wrong horse – and some might say this change shows Mercedes did as well.
SHOWS HOW SUCCESSION PLANNING CAN GO AWRY
Edd Straw
There will be those who assume that Elliott’s perceived failure as technical director is evidence he was a passenger in the success of Mercedes. That would be both incorrect and unfair, but it does illustrate the challenge of succession planning.
Elliott joined Mercedes as head of aerodynamics in July 2012, holding vital technical roles throughout the team’s era of unprecedented dominance. That made him the logical successor when Allison decided to step off the F1 coalface. After all, Elliott had earned it.
But different roles require different skillsets. Elliott has a vast amount to offer, or Mercedes wouldn’t have put him into the technical director role in the first place. It also wouldn’t be willing to make him chief technical officer of the company now. That’s still a vital position, but not one where he is the day-to-day technical lead of F1 car projects.
It’s about horses for courses, taking hugely accomplished people and ensuring they are in the roles that best match their exact qualities. And Elliott’s abilities will now be directed at the bigger picture, which includes the F1 team.
A fascinating, unanswerable, question is whether success made it more difficult for Mercedes to plan its succession in this case? Effectively, the team was locked into giving Elliott his chance because everything had worked so well before with him as part of it, the paradox being that a less successful environment might have meant this mistake – if it’s even fair to call it that – have been avoided?
Maybe, maybe not – but it illustrates how difficult it is for organisations to implement succession plans, given something that seemed so logical on paper has proved not to work as hoped. And it shows that, sometimes, both the wider organisation and the individuals involved can do everything right but still fail to deliver.
ECHOES OF RED BULL’S NEWEY RELIANCE
Glenn Freeman
There are strong mid-2010s Red Bull vibes here.
We used to hear a lot about how Adrian Newey wanted to scale back his F1 involvement and explore other projects. Then Red Bull would find itself in trouble with its car, and we’d start hearing how Newey had been drafted back in to take a more hands-on role to fix things.
Granted, what’s happening at Mercedes is much more formalised: Allison was given a new job title, and an official change back to how it was before is now taking place. At Red Bull it was usually a bit less formal than that.
But the similarities are obvious. A great team tries to usher in a new era of technical leadership, falls on hard times, and has to go back to the guy who led the run of successful cars in the past.
PREFERABLE TO A SACKING
Josh Suttill
In this age of trigger-happy football manager-style sackings in F1, it’s nice to see a technical director – whose tenure will probably be (rightly) chalked down as a ‘failure’ – not being completely cast aside.
By his own admission it seems, Elliott is not the right man for the job of technical director at Mercedes right now, but he’s still got a valuable contribution to make to the team.
Mercedes has clearly recognised that and rather than showing him the door it’s simply reassigned him somewhere he can demonstrate the value he’s previously shown.
It’s refreshing amid constant team boss and technical directors sackings, adding weight to Mercedes’ claims of a no-blame culture – and it probably also helps Mercedes not lose a knowledgable and effective operator to a rival too.
Keyword: Verdict: What change of technical director means for Mercedes