Both Mercedes will run the upgraded W17 at the United States Grand Prix on 23-25 October, closing out a two-week experiment that saw Kimi Antonelli race the newer car at Singapore while George Russell dropped back to the specification he last used in Azerbaijan.
Mercedes split their drivers’ machines because the upgrade package first introduced in Bahrain had been underperforming, and team principal Toto Wolff said the move was deliberate.
“We made the highly unusual… move… to have two different cars,” Wolff said, “because we felt we needed to accelerate our learning curve.”
The upgraded car, he added, needs to be driven and set up differently.
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“This new car needs a very different set-up philosophy than the previous car, and this is what we’re learning at the moment.”
Wolff also conceded that the newer package has rough edges.
“The new car seems to be a little more tricky to drive,” he told reporters at Marina Bay.
Antonelli’s first match point in Austin
The timing matters, because Antonelli arrives at the Circuit of the Americas with his first chance to clinch the drivers’ title. The 20-year-old leads Russell by 102 points with six rounds and a maximum of 150 points still on the table.
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The scenarios are tight. For the championship to be settled on Sunday, Antonelli needs to win and Russell to finish ninth or lower, with Lewis Hamilton of Ferrari also fifth or worse. Anything short, and the fight carries on to Mexico City.
If Antonelli does take the title in Austin, he would become the youngest world champion in Formula 1 history.
A buffer that bought time for 2027
The constructors’ championship is already a different conversation. After Singapore, Mercedes lead Ferrari by 134 points with six races to go, a cushion comfortable enough that Wolff has openly talked about shifting resources to next year’s car.
“2027 started a while ago, before the summer,” he said in September, describing the standings as “a nice buffer” that lets the team pivot.
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That is where the split-spec experiment feeds back in. Rather than lose a race weekend chasing data on an unreliable upgrade, Mercedes used one car to lock in a baseline and the other to push the new parts, giving the development group a clean comparison going into Austin and beyond. On Wolff’s own description of the Singapore trial, the plan is to run both drivers on the newer specification in Texas, with the expectation that it brings a performance gain.
The United States Grand Prix starts on Friday 23 October at the Circuit of the Americas, with the race itself at 3pm local time on Sunday 25 October.
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