Mercedes just did something its own boss calls “highly unusual” for a cutting-edge technology business — it sent its two drivers out in Singapore on two different specifications of the W17. George Russell kept the older package, while Kimi Antonelli ran the upgrade first introduced back in Bahrain.

The split followed a rough weekend testing at Sepang, where the new parts underwhelmed — the team’s first major upgrade since Canada simply wasn’t delivering what it promised. Antonelli finished third in Singapore and closed in on the championship lead, saying he’d found a narrow “window” where the upgraded car actually worked.

Toto Wolff isn’t pretending the split was anything but deliberate — a way to speed up learning rather than a chaotic experiment: “Does it have the performance we were hoping the upgrade would bring? I don’t think so yet, but it was a step in the right direction,” he said, adding that the new car needs a different setup philosophy altogether from the old one.

Both drivers are expected to run the upgrade in Austin — the next real test of whether the package actually has the pace to shape 2027 development too.

Source: RacingNews365 (https://racingnews365.com/toto-wolff-names-major-benefit-to-highly-unusual-mercedes-f1-experiment)