The FIA banned Mercedes‘ qualifying power trick after the Japanese Grand Prix. Three months later, Mercedes has it back – just wearing different clothes.
Per reporting from The Race, Kimi Antonelli and George Russell have been deliberately lifting off the throttle before crossing the timing line during their flying laps at Silverstone. On the surface, that looks like a driver error or a setup quirk. In reality, it’s a calculated workaround that gets Mercedes back to the same place the FIA told it to vacate.
How the Original Trick Worked – and Why It Got Killed
Both Mercedes and Red Bull had discovered a method to sustain the maximum 350kW output far longer than intended, rather than adhering to the required step-down sequence that demands power be reduced at 50kW per second to avoid abrupt cuts – a technique that handed them a 50kW-100kW power advantage over competitors whose systems were already bleeding off energy.
A regulatory clause allowed teams to bypass the ramp-down rule whenever the MGU-K was deactivated due to a technical issue or emergency situation – and that exemption formed the foundation of Mercedes’ approach.
The catch was a mandatory 60-second lockout on the MGU-K after the shutdown. That’s catastrophic during a race, but completely irrelevant at the end of a qualifying lap when drivers are simply crawling back to the pits.
The problem was what happened when the cooldown lap didn’t go to plan.
Williams driver Alex Albon stopped on track entirely at Suzuka as a consequence, while Max Verstappen was left cruising at low speed after his own moment in Japan.
The FIA decided cars grinding to a halt in live sessions wasn’t an acceptable tradeoff for a few hundredths, and the trick was outlawed ahead of Miami.
The New Version Is Legal, Simpler, and Already Spotted by Rivals
The Silverstone version doesn’t touch the MGU-K at all.
Mercedes is instead exploiting separate allowances in the technical regulations that let teams bypass the 50kW-per-second drop if the driver’s power demand turns negative and the ERS-K output needs to be cut further to match that demand. Provided drivers lift off before the battery runs dry at 350kW, they stay fully within the rules.
According to FIA sources who spoke with The Race, the technique is fully within the rules, provided power has not already dropped by more than 50kW in a single second prior to the throttle lift.
The data from Silverstone sprint qualifying tells the story clearly.
Data from the car reveals Antonelli exits Club Corner with a 7-8km/h edge on Lewis Hamilton, generated by the additional deployment, until he eases off the throttle – after which Hamilton, maintaining full throttle the entire time, recovers to cross the line 5km/h faster.
Antonelli entered the final sector trailing Hamilton by 0.125 seconds, trimmed that deficit to just 0.002 seconds at one point, then crossed the finish line 0.011 seconds behind.
Had Antonelli stayed flat, he would likely have taken pole on track – but he’d have risked breaching the ramp-down rules in the process.
Silverstone’s relatively compact run from the final corner to the start/finish line makes the gain more accessible here than at many other venues, which is probably why this is the first race where Mercedes has deployed it. The tactic has now been clocked by rival teams, though, so expect this particular wrinkle to become a paddock-wide conversation before long. Mercedes didn’t invent rule exploitation in F1, but it does have a habit of finding doors the FIA thought it had already closed.
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