Mercedes lacks tyre control as McLaren pulls ahead, says Allison

James Allison has identified tyre management as the core weakness behind Mercedes’ inconsistent 2025 season, while pointing to McLaren’s superiority in the same area.

“We're in a yo-yo effect between winning on our own merits and having bad weekends like we had in Austria and England,” the Mercedes technical director told Auto Motor und Sport.

“You don't have to be a great expert to realise that this is a world championship about who can best control tyre temperatures, and that's certainly not us.”

Allison explained that the combination of ground-effect aerodynamics and limited tyre preheating has made tyre behaviour harder to predict than ever.

“Two things are converging that make it more difficult today than before,” he said. “One is the limited preheating of the tyres… In conjunction with ground-effect cars, which place significantly more demands on the tyres in high-speed corners, the thermal stress will be greater than in the past.”

He added that restrictions on testing have further limited teams’ understanding of tyre dynamics.

“The rules prevent us from understanding tyres better. We're hardly allowed to test them,” Allison said. “The only way to better understand tyre behavior empirically is through Grand Prix weekends, but there are many other things to do.”

Ferrari team principal Frederic Vasseur echoed Allison’s concerns, framing tyres as the decisive factor in the 2025 season.

“Tyre management is not just the deciding factor for the 2025 season, but it's a 25-year-old problem,” Vasseur said. “Whoever can get the tyres into the best working window the fastest and keep them there has an even more significant impact when the field is as close together as it is today, and that's precisely where McLaren's big advantage lies.”