© LAT Images for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd
Mercedes’ Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin attended the Hungarian Grand Prix Friday Press Conference. Here is the full transcript.
Q: Shov, thank you for waiting. So you’ve had two consecutive wins. What chance making it three in a row here in Hungary?
Andrew SHOVLIN: Well, it’s probably a bit of a long shot. Silverstone definitely suited the car. It’s a more front-limited track, and it was cooler conditions. The thing where we’ve still got the kind of question mark on performance is rear-limited circuits in hot conditions. It’s going to be very hot on Sunday. So that’s what we’re working on. But I wouldn’t put us as favourites here.
Q: So we’re going to learn quite a lot about the car and its ultimate competitiveness here in Hungary.
AS: Yeah, I mean, it’s a good circuit to test that. And when you’re trying to focus on one area of performance, if that’s rear overheating, the best place to learn and understand your issues is a circuit that exacerbates that problem, even if we’d prefer all of them be like Silverstone. But they’re not, and it’s a good place for us to work on that problem.
Q: Tell us a little bit about the development rate that you guys have had. It’s been rapid. Have you been surprised by the progress that you’ve been able to make with this car?
AS: I wouldn’t say we’ve been surprised by it. We set ourselves some very ambitious performance targets to make sure we were competitive enough to qualify on pole and win races by the end of the year. And then we put in some ambitious plans to meet that in stages with various updates. what has been brilliant to see is just how well the whole organisation has responded to that challenge to try and get us back towards the front and what we have done has delivered. It’s nice when you’re in a situation where all your update kits, all the mechanical changes that we’ve made to the car have done what we hoped for and it’s reassuring that we’re sort of seeing that slow and steady move back towards the front.
Q: How much more is there to come from this car?
AS: Well, we’re flat out developing it. You don’t know what you’re going to be able to bring right to the end of the year because you haven’t done that work, but more of what we’ve been doing will be coming over the next few races, drip feeding it in more than going for big packages, but the mid-term future is quite exciting still. Lots of areas that we’re working on and hopefully those will come through and bring us the lap time that we hope.
Q: Final one from me. Can we just talk about George Russell? He’s been on pole for two of the last four races. He’s out-qualified Lewis Hamilton 10-2 this year. Has George stepped it up this year?
AS: Well, I mean, George has always set a very high bar in qualifying. And as soon as he was in F1, he was impressing. Even in the Williams, he was doing some pretty impressive qualifying sessions. So we know that he’s very quick. Lewis hasn’t disguised the fact that Saturdays were his tough day. He’s struggled with this whole generation of car, really, not suiting his style. He’s been working on how he drives. But we had a huge amount of work trying to get the car to: a) be quicker – it just hasn’t been quick enough – but also with a handling balance that the drivers can actually attack the lap on Saturday. So we’ve made progress. Recently, George has outqualified Lewis by some fairly fine margins. So it’s great for the team that Lewis is back up there and he’ll be pushing on. But yeah, we’ll keep working on that. And I’m sure that we’ll see hopefully some more Lewis pole positions as well.
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QUESTIONS FROM THE FLOOR
Q: (Jon Noble – Motorsport.com) Andrew, CrowdStrike had a problem this morning. Infrastructure went down. A lot of IT systems around the world kind of crashed. We saw some images of your pit wall with the blue screen of death from this morning. How disruptive was it? Did it drag on into the session? Is there any impact going forwards from here?
AS: Well, we’ve had great support from them and all our partners. There was a bit of work that we had to do. We’ve got a lot of computers around the garage and in pit walls and things here, and those all needed updating, but we’ve worked through that. The impact in FP1 was minimal, if not nil. So, as I said, it created a bit of work, but we’re back where we need to be now.
Q: (Carlo Platella – FormulaPassion.it) Question for Andrew Shovlin. About the development of the car, was it purely aerodynamic or have there been also some changes to the mechanics?
AS: Well, we’ve been working on the mechanical package as well. We’re trying to focus on every area that delivers performance because you need your wind tunnel to be delivering, but it’s only so hard you can make that work. Some of the differentiating steps are when you can bring a package that isn’t just the aero development that everyone’s trying to do. So we’ve made good gains there, and it’s a reflection that the whole team’s working well together. All the different functions of performance are all trying to work together to make sure that we can bring updates that do deliver what we need.
Q: (Jannik Sauer – Watson.de) A question for whoever has an opinion on it. The drivers yesterday, they talked about Olympic karting. And with this being the last race before the tournament starts, I would like to hear your opinion on that.
AS: I’d definitely watch it, yeah.
Q: (Andrew Benson – BBC Sport) Shov, you just mentioned something about Lewis’s style not suiting these cars or this year or whatever. Could you explain a bit more? Because he’s always been considered to be very adaptable in his driving style.
AS: I mean, it’s particularly he struggled on the single lap. So his long run pace is always there. And that’s been really useful. It’s more just the way that he wants to attack a corner. When you do that, then the car would snap to oversteer. You start to build tyre temperature. So most of our work has been trying to give him a car that you can drive the very attacking style, extract the lap time out of it without it just sort of breaking away on the way in and catching him by surprise.
Q: (Chris Medland – Racer) It’s a question for everyone except Dan, because you covered this this morning, Dan. Just talking about upgrades and the development cycle for this year, with it being so close and seeing the upgrade impact we’ll have, and then 2026 on the horizon and the work you can do at the start of next year, do you see yourselves bringing upgrades later into this season than normal and maybe bringing new parts in the final few races of the season? Does anything change compared to a normal season?
AS: Well, we’ll be reviewing the situation, see where we are by the break, but we’ve got plans for updates that run into that second bit of the season. Just where you position that resource split, we’ll see how the championship’s going and what we can achieve. But certainly everyone’s going to be updating until we get into that final block of flyaways, I think.
Q: (Diletta Colombo – Automoto.it) With this generation of cars, do you think that it’s more difficult to bring effective upgrades to the car?
AS: Well, yeah, just the rules meant there was a lot of extra learning that you had to undertake as a team to properly understand how these cars work, how you put performance on them. And over time, people are getting better at doing that. But it’s always easy to chase headline numbers and then end up with problems like bouncing. I think everyone’s facing that.
Source: FIA.com
