© LAT Images for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd
Mercedes’ Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin attended the Hungaroring Grand Prix Friday Press Conference. Here is the full transcript.
Q: Andrew, I’m going to start with you. Can we talk upgrades? You had a new front wing last time out at Silverstone. There’s more pieces on the car here, a few changes, is it going to be enough to make Mercedes best of the rest?
Andrew SHOVLIN: I mean, that’s what we’re working to achieve at the moment. They’re coming, I mean, we’re trying to get them on the car as quickly as we can, which is why some of the bits were here, some were in Silverstone. What we’ve done on the rear wing that’s quite specific to this this track. But McLaren were very quick at the last two races, so the goal is try and get ourselves ahead of them, which will put us in a good place for the fight for second.
Q: Well, let’s talk a little bit more about that fight for second. You’re 22 points ahead of Aston Martin, but the performance yo-yos between the teams, can you explain a little bit more about why that’s the case?
AS: There’ll be track specific elements. We look quite good in Barcelona on max downforce. And hopefully will go well here. But the fact is, you know, you can’t design your car for every single circuit. So you’re seeing the nature of the corner speed, whether ride is a big factor can come into it, whether it’s an overheating circuit, or one where it’s tricky to get the tyres to work, whether the balance is more oversteery, all of those things will change the relative performance. And then on top of that, you’ve got a pretty aggressive development race going on and you can see that with the steps that Williams made, that McLaren made, where people are bringing a lot of performance and the phasing of that is starting to juggle the order a bit.
Q: We’re talking about this battle for P2, why isn’t it a battle for P1? Why is it proving so hard to rein in Red Bull?
AS: The way the rules are, you know, if you launch a competitive car, in a cost cap, it is quite difficult for teams to catch up. Because if you’ve got a competitive car, you don’t need to be throwing updates at it week in, week out. They started in a very good place. And the fact is our wind tunnel resource is not very different to theirs and not very different to Ferrari’s, so that initial performance advantage you start with – and it has come down over the year – but when you look at how big it was in Bahrain and Jeddah, it’s always difficult to shut that down in terms of the championship.
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Q: Can we talk about George Russell now, because it was here one year ago that he got his first pole position. He said in an interview that he believes he’s now faster than Lewis Hamilton. Can you tell us a little bit about the journey he’s been on while he’s been at Mercedes and where you’ve seen the improvements in him?
AS: He’s a hugely professional driver who’s working very, very hard. And he’s one of those that you’d say no doubt he’ll win a championship at some point, providing we can give him a car that’s fit for that job. And we’re obviously working very hard to achieve that. But he’s very technical. He adapts well to different conditions. All good drivers get better over time, they’re focused on looking for every opportunity to improve. And when he got pole here last year it was a surprise for us, because we didn’t have a good Friday. We did make some changes to the car, but he did a fantastic job in Qualifying to get that. So, he’s super focused and no doubt that he’ll be part of much success for the team in the future.
Q: Andrew, let’s talk about the Alternative Tyre Allocation now. The rain in FP1 threw the cat among the pigeons a little bit, but how has that introduction of the ATA changed your approach to the weekend and to practice in particular?
AS: In terms of practice, they’ve taken two sets of tyres out of the allocation, you’ve got the same amount of running. So were it dry, you’d probably see teams running a bit less. You’ve got to use the tyres more sparingly. But the impact on practice won’t be huge. I think it’s just that you wouldn’t be necessarily pounding round for the full hour, because when they reduced it from an hour and a half to an hour, it meant that you took all that slack out of the programme. You know, we don’t sit around for 15 minutes waiting for someone else to clean the track, all teams are into it straight away.
Q: Final one from me. Spray guards. Mercedes trialled them at Silverstone last week. What was your take on what went on there?
AS: I mean, there’s more work to do on them, but it’s a problem that it would be useful to have a solution for, because I think the teams, and certainly the fans, hate it if a race can’t go ahead because the conditions are too difficult. They’re not ready to be moved into production and regulation at the moment. So there’s definitely work to do. They do improve the spray that you get from the tyres, but you still get a lot coming from the diffuser, in the way that the rear wing’s pulling it up. That’s all very powerful. But you know, interesting first steps and we’re providing the car and some bits to do that development. It’s the FIA’s project to decide where that goes next and what happens in the future.
QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR
Q: (Josh Suttil – The Race) Andrew, we’ve seen two of your customers – McLaren and Aston Martin – make a big leap. McLaren have been able to do that in-season. Is that something that’s possible for Mercedes this year? Obviously, it was easy for them, they were coming from further behind but is it something that’s possible for Mercedes or is it about next year?
AS: It’s encouraging because we know that the engine’s obviously, doing a good job in those cars. We’re working hard to try and move forward. I think the step McLaren made was pretty impressive. You can see that they’ve changed a fair bit on their car. But for us, we do need to close that gap to Red Bull. We’re still developing the car. Whether or not we could find the half a second that they look to have found, I don’t know. That’d be a stretch target.
Q: (Christian Nimmervoll – Motorsport-total.com) Andrew, you’re well aware of Nyck de Vries’s capabilities and even Franz in the press conference, although they sacked him, was very, very positive about his technical feedback. Is there room alongside Mick Schumacher for a second simulator driver for returning to the Mercedes family?
AS: I think Nyck will be looking for more than just to become a simulator driver, so he’ll want to be doing racing. I’ve only spoken to him by text and he said he’ll let me know how his plans are coming on. He was certainly very useful for us in that role and we’d be welcome to get him back in that role but I suspect that his focus will be on finding race seats. And if it’s not in Formula 1, in some other big and competitive series. He’s clearly very talented: F2 champion, Formula E champion, which is a very difficult series to win. And he’ll be looking back to get into a winning seat again.
Q: (Matt Kew – Autosport) Andrew, you’ve had a few races now to correlate properly the big upgrade package that came in for Monaco. What has that given you in terms of understanding the car? But also, has it actually given you lap time, a major step forward, or is it about the same? Can you just sort of quantify that for us?
AS: The gains change track to track. The front end of the car is a bit more coherent, a bit stronger now so we’re having to work to balance that. But it does look to have gone in the right direction and our correlation over the last year has been strong in that we make bits and we race them, we’re not putting kits on and off trying to decide whether we’ve done the right thing. However, look at where Aston Martin were at the start of the year and then where they’ve been in some of the recent races. That’s only because other people are developing very quickly. It’s difficult to gauge the progress when you just look at how the teams stack up. But the fact is, you can see those moves where people do bring updates. We just need to work to try and improve the development rate but the focus for us is making sure we can challenge Red Bull or whoever it is at the front next year. So it’s a case of balancing that bigger goal with what we can do on this car and also learning with this car because if you don’t change the car, you don’t learn a lot. So a lot of the development is about learning for the future.
Q: (Luke Smith – The Athletic) Andrew about James Vowles. Andrew, I know you guys go way back. What was he like in his evolution and ultimately becoming a team principal and stepping up to that role with Williams this year?
AS: Yeah, all my good memories from races… I was sat next to James on the pit wall for 20 years or whatever it was. He’s left us with a really impressive strategy group. So Rosie [Wait] is running that now and that’s working very well, but partly because James was trying to put the group in place that could follow him. But his ambitions were always more than just doing the strategy. But it’s great to see him enjoying the role at Williams and having a positive effect there because we knew that he would be a loss to our team. But yeah, nice that he’s enjoying success.
Q: (Edd Straw – The Race) Andrew, on the spray guards, what’s your general feeling in terms of the solution, direction that’s been taken? Does it need to be something a little bit more comprehensive to contain that amount of spray? And if so, how high should the tolerance be for the aero disruption of what’s going to be a bolt on part given the potential to avoid, say, a Spa ’21?
AS: If the loss is the same for everyone, then the scale of it doesn’t matter too much. You obviously need it to make a tangible difference. There’s also difficult… you’ve got to stop the race to fit these things, or the race has to have not started to fit them. But as I said, it’s not our project. We were just contracted to do some work, to run a car and the FIA will steer it and decide where the future goes. But the goal of making sure we can give the fans, who’ve paid to come to the track on Sunday, a race to watch is definitely a worthwhile one to do. And I think it’s good that the sport has these initiatives where it’s trying to find solutions to the bigger problems.
Q: (Adam Cooper – motorsport.com) What are your thoughts on tyre blankets and the challenge Pirelli is faced… Williams was involved in the last test at Silverstone?
AS: I think the challenge of the dries is a lot bigger than the wets and you can definitely run race weekends without blankets because you could do it next week if you wanted to do that. The question is, does it improve the racing, do you have a better show? And whilst you can do it in testing, the grip comes halfway around the lap and then it’s relatively normal for the drivers from there on. There are scenarios that you can’t really do in testing like a wet to dry transition if there’s a safety car and all the cars are in the pits. There is so little grip if you’re in a damp pit lane on a 20 degree slick tyre that’s designed to run at temperatures up to 100. And whether those elements of safety are covered off are we ready to commit to this as a sport? I think there’s still a number of questions to be asked. But what we said from the outset was that we need to get the product ready before we commit to it in regulation and that conversation, I think, still needs to be determined. Will the sport be in a better place if we get rid of blankets or not? And will it have a good or a bad effect on how the racing pans out?
Q: (Ian Parkes – New York Times) Andrew, during Lewis’s media session yesterday, he was asked a very similar question to yourself with regard to why Mercedes has not quite caught up yet with Red Bull. Within his answer, he remarked that given the aerodynamics of the car, the vortices encountered underneath it are, to use his words, mind-blowing. Can you elaborate as to what it is you are encountering underneath the car at present that is complicating matters and making it then difficult to try and develop it going forward?
AS: Well, with the old regulations, which we had a good grasp on, you didn’t need to consider the car in the same dynamic sense. You were just saying it’s at a certain roll angle, steer angle, certain ride heights and in doing that, you could capture what was going on. The flow structures under our car, under every car, are more complicated now and they’re more transient. And what Lewis was referring to was really the fact that, as other teams will have had to develop their tools to cope with this new set of aero regulations, we’re getting to a stage where the correlation is good, we can start to understand the effect of changes. But we’re not at the position we were with the regulations in 2020/2021 where you had a really, really good grasp of everything that was going on. So he’s just referring to the fact that the way the floors work is more complicated than it used to be.
Source: FIA.com
