Rob Smedley says that while some of the people he’s spoken with at Mercedes have been cautious about the team’s prospects this season, he refuses to rule them out of the title fight.

Mercedes were last involved in a race for the championship double in 2021 with Lewis Hamilton coming up a lap short when he was beaten on the final lap of the season in Abu Dhabi by Max Verstappen.

Can Mercedes fight for the F1 2025 titles?

The team did, however, retain the Constructors’ title for an eighth season but lost as Formula 1 welcomed ground-effect cars, which saw the rise of Red Bull coupled with a sharp decline in Mercedes’ results.

There was a light in the tunnel last year when the team made notable strides forward. Although still contending with an unpredictable W15 where performance was often track and temperature dependent, Mercedes won four Grands Prix.

This year the team has sought to resolve last year’s issues with the new W16, only for motorsport boss Toto Wolff to admit he is a “bit worried at the moment” given Mercedes didn’t destroy the field despite the unseasonably cold temperatures in Bahrain.

F1 2025: Your guide to the new season

👉 Five under-the-radar stories to look out for in F1 2025

👉 The ultimate F1 2025 guide: Everything you need to know about the 2025 season

“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,” he said.

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

“I think we sometimes take junctions that go in the wrong direction,” he added. “Maybe we tried something in the afternoon that didn’t function. It wasn’t so good.”

But it’s not just when speaking with the media that Mercedes are downplaying their chances as former Ferrari and Williams man Smedley revealed he’s been hearing the same during his chats with personnel from Brackley.

“I was listening and talking to some of their guys,” Smedley told the Formula for Success podcast, “and listening to their launch and they have this very, I don’t want to say it’s a sensible position that they take, it’s very self effacing, and it’s very, ‘oh well, we don’t know what we’re going to do and whether we’re going to be able to do it’.”

“But,” he insists, “you just can’t count them out, right? I think they’ve been so strong for so long now they’re not in the front, it’s anomalous, but expect them to come back into it.”

Mercedes, the 51-year-old reckons, will be part of a four-way fight for the titles with Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bull also in the mix.

“Honestly, what we’re seeing in the little bit that Ferrari have shown, if you look at how good they’ve been in the recent past, they’re in with a shout,” he said. “There’s no doubt about it.

“Lewis Hamilton going there, and he has all of that motivation back. They are a team that are now getting their act together. They know what they’re doing.

“McLaren last year, they were only getting stronger. They’ll only be stronger again, because now they’ve learned how to win a World Championship, right? And you know what that feels like when you’re kind of in the doldrums then all of a sudden you click over your first World Championship, and that’s it, you’re away to the races.

“Red Bull, really interesting. Want to see what their design looks like when we finally get a good look at it post-Adrian Newey. I think that’s super important when we see what that’s going to look like, and how strong they are as well at the start of the season, and then how they can recover, because they always had a very good knack of being able to do that. So be really interested to see that.”

“So right now,” he added, “all of those teams could win the Constructors’ Championship this year.”

Read next: Uncovered: What Lewis Hamilton said to Sainz about Mercedes