© LAT Images for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd
James Allison says the British Grand Prix upgrades were “the last big package” the team will bring this year, but “there will be a few tweaks here and there”.
Mercedes brought its last major upgrade package to the British Grand Prix, and technical boss James Allison says the team was “very happy” with its effects.
“I’ll say yes, that’s the simple and short answer,” the Briton said when asked if the upgrades provided the desired effect.
“We brought a decent aero package to the track, we definitely saw an improvement in our performance and we were very happy with it.
“Whether the performance was a little bit more or a little bit less than we imagined is really hard to tell because you don’t get the luxury of performing a controlled experiment.
“You don’t run the old package and the new package several times doing back-to-back tests with fresh tyres each time because the weekend just doesn’t give you that luxury.
“Nevertheless, you do and are able to make some comparison, because you make measurements on the car with all the sensors and you can compare back to the weekends before and look at the performance of the car before and compare to the one you had this weekend.
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“And it did all seem to be behaving very well and if you then look at the stopwatch, you could see that just relative to the field we had moved forward this weekend.
“We were able to close some ground on Red Bull and we were able to have a more competitive weekend as a result. So we came home from the weekend pretty chipper about the upgrade.”
However, with the team’s focus already shifted to their 2022 car, Allison says this was the last big upgrade of 2021. However, there will still be some smaller ones.
“Is there any more to come? There may be, here and there,” the Briton confirms.
“But the vast, sort of main industrial effort of our development programme, that was the last big package we will bring this year.
“But there will be a few tweaks here and there where we can see efficiently that we can bring some performance without distracting us from the big effort that is now going into next year’s car.”
