Mercedes hope Lewis Hamilton can repeat past heroics to help them achieve their goal of returning to the front of the grid as soon as possible.
The Silver Arrows have been the strongest team in Formula 1 since the start of the Hybrid Era in 2014. They adapted quickest to the regulation changes and embarked upon a period of unprecedented dominance.
But their grip on the constructors' championship has loosened this season, and their eight-year winning streak looks set to come to an end. Mercedes got their development wrong for this latest generation of cars, leaving them in the wake of Red Bull and Ferrari.
And they have been playing catch-up ever since, focussing all their efforts on closing the gap so they can fight for race wins again. At the half-way stage they have made significant progress, but are still unable to go toe-to-toe with the front-runners.
Mercedes hope that will change soon, and suggest it might happen even before the end of the current campaign. To turn that hope into reality, they could benefit from Hamilton repeating what he managed to do in the 2009 season with McLaren.
Hamilton regularly failed to score points early in the year with his car well off the pace. But in the second half of the season it clicked and he was on the podium in every race that he finished, including wins in Hungary and Singapore.
Mercedes engineering director Andrew Shovlin worked for title-winner Brawn GP that year. Asked if he thinks Hamilton can repeat the trick in 2022, he told reporters: "We started brilliantly [in 2009] didn't have the resources to keep up and were struggling to get near the podium by the end of the year. There may well be parallels.
"If you looked at the situation with McLaren back then the car that they launched wasn't really equivalent to the capability within the team. When they started to understand what they had to do with the regulations, the development rate was really impressive. And a parallel might be that within our team, we're just starting to really get back the enjoyment for that engineering challenge and the development challenge.
"It always takes time... there's a lag between your understanding and your learning and actually bringing bits to the track that make it quicker but the atmosphere is one of a team that's determined to get back to the front.
"Our goal remains to be the fastest car – whether we can achieve that this year or is that going to take us 'til next year I don't know, but we're all fighting very hard for that."
