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By the very high standards of its eight years of dominance from 2014, the past two seasons have been tough for all inside the team after watching rivals Red Bull and Max Verstappen sweep everyone aside following the introduction of new aerodynamic regulations at the start of 2022.
Respectively finishing third and second in the constructors’ championship over the last two years is not to be sniffed at, but just one victory over that period has underlined how far Mercedes has fallen behind.
With Allison returning to his former role of technical director in April last year, swapping positions with Mike Elliott who became chief technical officer, there are high expectations going into the new season.
Mercedes is to unveil an all-new car with its W15 next month, with team principal Toto Wolff confirming before the end of last season that ‘almost every component had been changed’ in its bid to return to the front.
Allison insists the motivation is high to fight back this year. Speaking on the ‘Performance People’ podcast, he said: “There’s a sense that we’re all in this together and that people have sort of written our future for us – the once great team now in decline – and all of the negative narrative that comes around with that.
“As long as internally we’re saying, ‘Well, let them say that, because that’s their job, they’ve got to say something’.
“Our job is to show them they’re wrong, and imagine how good that’s going to feel when they’ve all been looking sympathetically at us, and with faux sympathy, in our direction.
“We just suck that up and go, ‘Okay, right, we’re going to work on this, we’re going to come back, and we’re going to show them’, and that is definitely galvanising.
“As long as it doesn’t spill over into a negative victim complex, that it’s more just the cheerful application of the skill in this place, to come out and surprise people, that we’re not going to go quietly into the night.
“This is a place full of extraordinary talent who have got absolutely everything they need in their head, their character and the equipment we have at the factory to be resilient to this and show that we can rebuild and produce the car that is deservedly at the front once more.”
For Allison, now at the forefront of the redesign and overseeing the various departments under his wing, and pulling them together to row in the same direction, he claims there is a level of excitement in again being the hunter rather than the hunted.
“I certainly feel that,” said Allison. “I think that as an organisation, if you have been at the top and you start to fall, there are two ways of looking at it.
“There’s a sort of a backward-looking way of lamenting what you once were, and going ‘How could this have happened to us?’
“If you have that backward-looking mentality it can be quite depressing, and likely, actually, to prolong the downturn.
“If on the other hand you’re able to say, ‘Well, we are where we are. Let’s figure out what we need to do so we are deserving of winning, and let’s enjoy that transition from what we deserve to be right now, and what we’re going to be in the future’.
“The sooner everyone can be on that page, the shorter the slump is, and the more fun it is because the sense of growing momentum is deeply joyful.
“The idea that you’re building the things that are going to allow you to walk around the paddock more with your chest out at some point in the future, that’s really energising.
“Much as maybe the outside world might imagine this is deeply painful internally, and on one level it is, it’s also really exciting.
“A lot of whether it’s depressing or exciting is how you choose to look at it.”
