Mercedes to use Lewis Hamilton's final races to develop George Russell's next F1 car

Mercedes plan to make the most of a "good opportunity" to develop their next car across the final few rounds of the current season.

As the 2024 campaign reaches its climax, the Silver Arrows are not involved in either title battle. They are fourth in the constructors' standings, more than safe from the teams below them but also way off those above.

So with their season's fate all-but mathematically assured, it makes sense for to look to their future. The W16, which will be driven next term by and new addition , is in development and the final races of the current campaign will help provide some crucial data.

And the team's trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin has confirmed the plan to use what remains of this season to do all they can to ensure they hit the ground running in a new post- era when F1 touches down in Melbourne next March.

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In , he said: "It is certainly a good opportunity for us to do a bit more experimentation in the race weekends, but the key thing for us is making sure we have done the important bits of learning before the 2025 season.

"We are not bringing any more major updates to the car. It might be that we have some test items, some small bits of bodywork that we are looking at but again this would be very much in the context of learning for the future.

"There will be lots of opportunity to do set-up work, lots of opportunity to use the two cars to compare different approaches and, hopefully, over the next few we can just add to the learning that we have already made during this season."

Antonelli will take Hamilton's place next year and got another opportunity to take current Mercedes machinery for a spin in FP1 in Mexico last Friday. Assessing how the young Italian got on, Shovlin added: "We were really pleased with what we saw from Kimi. We were keen that he managed to do the entire session which he did well.

"There were five rookies there - Kimi was the fastest amongst them, so that was good to see. After the session, Kimi was probably a bit disappointed that he was not further up the timesheets. He had certainly kept a lot in reserve on those low fuel laps making sure that he kept the car on the track and did not do any damage because he knows the situation we are in in terms of shortage of parts.

"I think he felt frustrated that he did not go quicker but from our side we are very pleased with everything that we saw from him. At the moment he is also spending the race weekends with the team. He is understanding the flow of the sessions, the flow of the meetings, how you actually approach a Formula 1 race weekend which is great... We are looking forward to getting him in the car next year."