Mercedes’ turnaround throughout the 2024 season has been larger than the staff 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 staff had simply 96 factors to its title after the Monaco Grand Prix. Since then at the 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 staff was concentrating 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 automotive and perceive what it was you needed to do to make it fast.
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“We might see it had sure strengths, however it additionally had loads of weaknesses. The staff has responded brilliantly to that problem. We all know the place we wish to get to by way of efficiency degree. We knew that we wished to be profitable races, and we set ourselves a goal of by the tip of the season, we wished 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 staff has a little bit of momentum behind it, and we hope that we will 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 working, however Shovlin says the brand new components are nonetheless a step ahead that the staff believes it could get on high of.
“The rationale we reverted the automotive to the Silverstone spec on Friday evening was as a result of we had a very good race in Silverstone,” he stated. “Spa and Silverstone usually are not dramatically totally different circuits by way of the nook pace vary that you’re coping with.
“We had clearly launched some issues someplace. We expect that was largely resulting from how we have been working 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 number of points with the stability. Going to that Silverstone automotive received all of it again to regular.
“We’ve got since had time to take a look at the information to grasp what it was that we did, and we’re fairly assured that we are going to be going for a reintroduction in Zandvoort.”
