© LAT Images for Mercedes-Benz Grand Prix Ltd
Mercedes’ Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin says: “We’re delivering on the mechanical side, we’re delivering in terms of weight, in terms of getting a car that works around a range of conditions, and managing the tyres better.”
After two and a half years of struggles, Mercedes finally managed to get two wins in a row at the Austrian and British grands prix.
The team’s Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin says this is the result of the team firing on all cylinders.
“It has been a fairly long road, but it has been a road with pretty linear progress on it,” the Briton told the F1 Nation podcast.
“To the outside world, it looks like it’s very nonlinear, because suddenly we’re appearing on the podium, and we’ve won a couple of races recently.
“The team has got much more focused, the performance machine is working really well, everyone is looking for performance in every area.
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“Part of the reason that we’ve been able to make relative progress against everyone else, is just that all the key performance areas of the business are delivering, not just the wind tunnel.
“We’re delivering on the mechanical side, we’re delivering in terms of weight, in terms of getting a car that works around a range of conditions, and managing the tyres better.
“It’s a lot of fun. And in a way, this challenge, there’s elements of this that are more fun than all those years of winning, because when you’re winning everything, you don’t have the contrast.
“If you say how have we done it, it’s that we’ve got a group here at Brackley and at Brixworth that are just hugely motivated to get Mercedes back to winning championships.”
Shovlin added it is now a matter of being able to continue this development curve.
“I mean, there hasn’t really been one [single thing]. What we have done well has been delivering three or four updates to practically every single race for about the last eight or nine races.
“Some of them are mechanical, some of them are aerodynamics, some of them will be to help the bouncing or improve the ride.
“In the last four or five races, and you don’t know that you’ll succeed every time, but we’ve plunked a car on the track in FP1, and it’s been there or thereabouts.
“Then you can just start the set-up work with the drivers of fine-tuning it, following the evolution of the track as the grip comes up. That has certainly helped us.
“When the rear tyres were running hot, we had to understand why that was happening, there were a few baked-in problems which you just don’t fix those things in three days of winter testing in Bahrain.
“It took a while for us to pick those off one by one, and as I said, the performance development rate has been strong. We can keep that going for a bit longer.
“But the big question is, how long can we keep putting performance on the car at the rate that we have been?” he concluded.
