Mercedes says it is prepared to accept the "consequences" if it defeats Red Bull and Ferrari to finish second in the F1 constructors' championship.
With three rounds to go in 2025, George Russell and Kimi Antonelli have steered the Brackley team to second place in the standings, with Mercedes 32 points clear of Red Bull in third and 36 ahead of Ferrari in fourth.
The higher up the constructors' a team finishes, the more prize money it it allocated, but finishing second would also hand Mercedes less aerodynamic testing time for the first half of the 2026 season.
The sliding scale introduced in 2022, known as the Aerodynamic Testing Restrictions (ATR) gives those teams who finish higher up in the standings less testing time for the next season in a bid to balance out performance.
The ATR allocations reset mid-way through the season, but a team is stuck with the allocation it receives for the first half of the next season, which is particularly important for 2026 given the huge scale of the changes to the technical regulations, with active aerodynamics set to be introduced.
However, trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin is firm that the team should aim to finish second to McLaren, and "deal with the consequences" of less wind-tunnel and CFD development time to start the new era.
"Your progress in the wind-tunnel isn't only a function of how many runs you have," Shovlin told media, including RacingNews365.
"McLaren has had the least, but they've done the best job overall this year, but it would be relatively easy to estimate what the impact might be.
"We would rather finish second and deal with the consequences in terms of wind-tunnel time, and it resets in the middle of next year.
"We would never choose to strategically finish fourth, and it is probably a rather poor silver lining to the situation if that were the event, but our focus is on trying to finish second."
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