Mercedes’ turnaround through the 2024 season has been larger than the workforce was anticipating, trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin admits.
The primary eight races of this season yielded a greatest results of fifth place in a grand prix for Mercedes, and the workforce had simply 96 factors to its identify after the Monaco Grand Prix. Since then at the very least one Mercedes has completed on the rostrum at each race, with two pole positions and a run of three wins within the final 4 races delivering a step ahead when it comes to outcomes that Shovlin says has come ahead of the workforce was concentrating on.
“The primary factor is the progress,” Shovlin mentioned. “The place we have been within the early races in Bahrain and in Jeddah, it was tough to have a look at the automotive and perceive what it was you needed to do to make it fast.
“We may see it had sure strengths, however it additionally had loads of weaknesses. The workforce has responded brilliantly to that problem. We all know the place we wish to get to when it comes to efficiency stage. We knew that we needed to be profitable races, and we set ourselves a goal of by the top of the season, we needed to be qualifying on pole and profitable races.
“We’ve got now had three wins within the final 4 races. We’ve got had six podiums on the trot. That has maybe been greater than we had anticipated at that time. We’re actually having fun with the racing now. We’re having fun with the problem. It feels just like the workforce has a little bit of momentum behind it, and we hope that we are able to carry that into the ultimate little bit of the season, proceed to develop and hopefully proceed to win some races.”
The victory in Belgium got here regardless of Mercedes reverting to a earlier specification of automotive and eradicating some upgrades after Friday’s apply operating, however Shovlin says the brand new elements are nonetheless a step ahead that the workforce believes it may get on high of.
“The explanation we reverted the automotive to the Silverstone spec on Friday evening was as a result of we had a superb race in Silverstone,” he mentioned. “Spa and Silverstone are usually not dramatically totally different circuits when it comes to the nook velocity vary that you’re coping with.
“We had clearly launched some issues someplace. We predict that was largely resulting from how we have been operating the automotive in Spa, not induced by the updates themselves. That was giving us a little bit of bouncing within the high-speed corners, in addition to a couple of points with the steadiness. Going to that Silverstone automotive received all of it again to regular.
“We’ve got since had time to have a look at the info to know what it was that we did, and we’re fairly assured that we are going to be going for a reintroduction in Zandvoort.”
