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Mercedes’ Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin says “rear overheating” is “an area where I don’t think we are as good as McLaren, Red Bull or Ferrari”.
In a talk with Motorsport, Mercedes’ Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin revealed Mercedes is focusing on solving one particular issue over the winter break.
“Rear overheating, that’s an area where I don’t think we are as good as McLaren, Red Bull or Ferrari, and that’s probably affected us most recently at tracks like Singapore,” Shovlin said.
“We’re looking at what we can do to get temperature out of the rear tyres, and any work in that area is twofold: one is, can we put less temperature in, and the other one is, can we take more temperature out?”
The team is also focusing on solving their issues on bumpier tracks.
“It’s very fair to say on those [bumpier] tracks, we do suffer more often. You can do analysis on how high people are running, and I don’t think we’re wildly different to anyone else.
“But ride is an area that we’ve been focusing on with these regulations.”
Shovlin added that while Mercedes is tackling their issues, other teams are also making their own improvements.
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“The whole thing of development in Formula 1 is fixing problems, and can you fix them quicker than your competitors? That’s how you get to the front.
“If you look at when we brought our updates compared to our main competitors, we were often bringing our big package a couple of races later.
“But if we brought it earlier, it would be a smaller package. So the fact is, on average, over a season, we’ve not been quick enough when we deliver an update.
“We had a few races where we were competitive, the teams were trying to beat them, bring theirs, and they moved back ahead.”
Shovlin also explained that, since Mercedes decided to change their car concept in 2024, they faced numerous issues at the beginning of the season, and that hampered their ability to consistently challenge their competition.
“The car wasn’t well balanced, wasn’t working across a range of tracks. We got on top of those issues over the first seven or so races.
“And then I think we’ve just been in a normal development race over the remainder of the year,” the Briton concluded.
