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Mercedes’ Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin explains what the team now knows about the issues they faced in Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
Mercedes’ performance in the first two races of 2024 has been worse than the team expected after pre-season testing.
In Mercedes’ Saudi Arabian Grand Prix debrief video, Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin explains what the team has found by running different setups with Lewis Hamilton and George Russell.
“The learning of it is just that when you change things you can see the differences,” the Briton said.
“So one car making changes, you can see how it performs run to run. We can also look at the global performance of the two cars but fundamentally the limitations that we had in qualifying and the race, they were broadly the same for both.
“So it’s telling you it’s not a small difference, it’s not a tiny bit of camber or a spring or bar here and there. It’s something more fundamental that we need to dig into and understand.
“There’s definitely data that we’re picking through from Jeddah. We’re also looking at data from the Bahrain race, Bahrain test, and we will come up with a plan for how we approach free practice in Melbourne.
“But it’s not just based on what we did in Jeddah. There’s a lot of work going on within the aerodynamics department, vehicle dynamics department.
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“We’re trying to design some experiments there that will hopefully give us a direction that’s good for performance.”
Shovlin also explained what the team found by analyzing where the W15 faced a deficit compared to their competitors like McLaren, Aston Martin and Ferrari.
“It’s a few things. One of them was the balance wasn’t great. Those very fast corners, the walls aren’t particularly far away, so are the ones where the driver wants a lot of confidence, and quite often we were snapping to oversteer if they really leaned on the tires.
“You can easily imagine how unsettling that is for the drivers. Now, that was a factor in a qualifying and the race.
“In qualifying we were also suffering a bit with the bouncing. That was less of a problem in the race — there’s more fuel on the car, you’re going a bit slower. And that seemed to calm down and wasn’t such an issue.
“The big one is we don’t really have enough grip. So that’s one of the things that we are working hard on this week because Melbourne has similar nature of corners.
“We’re doing a lot of work to try and understand why we did not seem to have the grip of some of our close competitors,” Shovlin concluded.
