Mercedes’ turnaround throughout the 2024 season has been greater than the crew was anticipating, trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin admits.
The primary eight races of this season yielded a finest results of fifth place in a grand prix for Mercedes, and the crew 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 by way of outcomes that Shovlin says has come before the crew was focusing on.
“The principle factor is the progress,” Shovlin stated. “The place we have been within the early races in Bahrain and in Jeddah, it was troublesome to take a look at the automobile and perceive what it was you needed to do to make it fast.
“We might see it had sure strengths, but it surely additionally had loads of weaknesses. The crew has responded brilliantly to that problem. We all know the place we need to get to by way of 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 now had three wins within the final 4 races. We’ve 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 crew 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 automobile and eradicating some upgrades after Friday’s observe working, however Shovlin says the brand new elements are nonetheless a step ahead that the crew believes it might probably get on high of.
“The explanation we reverted the automobile to the Silverstone spec on Friday night time was as a result of we had a very good race in Silverstone,” he stated. “Spa and Silverstone will not be dramatically totally different circuits by way of the nook velocity vary that you’re coping with.
“We had clearly launched some issues someplace. We expect that was largely because of how we have been working the automobile 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 number of points with the steadiness. Going to that Silverstone automobile received all of it again to regular.
“We’ve since had time to take 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.”
