© LAT Images for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd
Mercedes’ Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin says the team “thought we’d made a good car, and underneath it was a good car, it just had some problems that we had to get on top of”.
Mercedes’ 2024 season didn’t start well performance-wise, and it appeared that it was going to be another year on the back foot for the team.
However, they soon came to grips with their car, and they are now pretty regularly in a position to fight for race wins.
Mercedes’ Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin says the team always believed in the potential of the W15.
“We always thought this car on its day it seemed to be quick,” the Briton said.
“But being able to do that across a whole weekend was a bit of a challenge for us in the early part of the year.”
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Shovlin also explained the ‘sudden’ improvement of the car wasn’t due to one ‘breakthrough’ moment.
“It wasn’t so much a breakthrough moment. It’s not one development, it’s lots of things that we’ve done to try and get on top of those issues.
“We were surprised we weren’t quicker at the start. We thought we’d made a good car, and underneath it was a good car, it just had some problems that we had to get on top of.
“Now we’re seeing the results of that hard work.”
Shov added that Mercedes is continuing to develop upgrades at a fast rate.
“The rate of them is really high at the moment which is just a feature of how well the organisation is working.
“The generation of ideas has been good. Ultimately that’s where all the new parts and new developments come from.
“A lot of success in F1 is about learning and it’s about ideas and at the moment the rate of learning has been high this year.
“Correlation is never perfect, but it’s an area where we’ve definitely seen improvement. The better your models, the better you can develop offline. And as I’ve said, we’ve got lots of different models.
“That ability to model what the car is going to do is one of your best ways of developing these days when you haven’t got endless amounts of tunnel testing or track testing,” he concluded.
