Mercedes racing director Andrew Shovlin says that Mercedes has accepted that they had problems in the last two races, they had problems with the balance of the car, so they have to see in the data what it is about.
Lewis Hamilton complained about a lack of pace at the Italian Grand Prix after Mercedes unveiled a new floor mat and diffuser at the Belgian Grand Prix.
After six consecutive podium finishes for Mercedes, Monza was the second race in which the team did not finish on the podium.
“In the last three races, we made various floor comparisons. We’ve basically compared the base and what we’re sure of is that it’s producing the load we expect,” Shovlin said in Mercedes’ post-Monza briefing.
“We understand this by measuring the force that the car creates on the road through the suspension. We also look at the pressures generated in the car and can relate that to what we see in the wind tunnel. That gives us a good idea of whether the car is doing what we expect.”
“I have to say that this is not as big a gain as we expected, it is quite a small package, but we are confident that it produces the desired load,” he points out.
So, have the updates changed the features of the vehicle?
Although Hamilton said the car “felt a lot better” at Monza on Saturday, he made a few mistakes in qualifying that cost him around 0.1 of a second. George Russell says that Mercedes “doesn’t have the pace to compete with Ferrari and McLaren.”
“The car behaves differently from track to track,” explains Shovlin.
“On some tracks it works very well, on other tracks we struggle with the balance of the car, regardless of the aerodynamics. But yes, we have to admit that the last two races were not as good as the previous ones. We have to admit that on some tracks we struggle with the balance of the car,” he notes.
“It could be a normal variation from track to track, but we will look at that over the next few days.”
“There are other updates we’re bringing as well as all of these. So there are a lot of things that we have to look at, we have a lot of data right now and we’ll see what we can get out of it in the coming days,” added Andrew Shovlin.
