Mercedes may still be undecided on the direction they’re going to take with their nose design in 2025 and used their time on track in the first day of testing to evaluate two different options.

Kimi Antonelli’s first session behind the wheel of the W16 saw the Italian tick a number of items off Mercedes‘ checklist but visually, the nose was perhaps the most interesting of those.

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Additional reporting by Thomas Maher

Mercedes had seemingly made the switch to a longer nose tip for 2025, with the team revealing images of the W16 with a solution that hung over the front of the second element (left) and whilst the team did complete running with this option during the morning session, they also had another up their sleeve too.

Also mounted on the W16 during the first four hours of running was a nose design in-keeping with the one used during 2024, whereby the tip sits on the leading edge of the second front wing element, exposing the gap between the elements (inset, arrowed, below).

There’s clearly going to be a difference in the behaviour of the airflow between these two solutions, so it’s interesting to see that Mercedes are looking to vindicate their decision with a real world example, rather than simply trust any perceived performance advantage that might have shown up in their simulations.

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The length of the nose tip and its shape is not a design feature that’s uniform across the grid in any case, meaning there’s performance to be gained or lost both directly and downstream depending on a number of factors, with their rivals having also made changes throughout this regulatory period.

Giving his initial impressions after watching the morning’s running, before climbing into the W16 himself, George Russell told media including PlanetF1.com: “This morning was a solid start for the team.

“The car’s handling well, it’s obviously very different conditions here compared to what we used to, very windy – and we also know that last season, for example, there were such massive fluctuations in performance from all the teams.

“If you come away from his test quickest or fourth quickest or third quickest, you may not be able to read too much into it, but nevertheless, the car seemed to be performing well.”

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