Mercedes have given a glimpse of the upgrades they intend to bring to the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, where they admit they need to work on their consistency over the weekend to get more out of their upgrades.
The German team brought the first half of the new package in Miami, while the second half will follow at the upcoming race weekend in Imola. Speaking in Mercedes’ post-race video, race director Andrew Shovlin explained that the parts worked as expected in Miami.
However, Andrew admitted that the rate of development of their competitors, coupled with some ongoing issues with their car, could make it difficult to make this progress on track.
“We were able to pull about half of our upgrade package to Miami and then the other half will arrive in Imola. We are working hard on future races to try to bring progress ON them as well,” said Shovlin.
“Did it work as expected? Yes, everything looks like it’s delivering the performance we’ve been hoping for through the floor. The problem at the moment is that everyone else is developing their cars, so you’ve seen McLaren with a big package and it looks like they’ve moved forward, and the handling issues the drivers have to contend with make it hard to really see all that performance as a real step forward.”
“What we’ve found is that the car can behave very differently from session to session and until we understand that, we’re always going to blunt the benefit we can get from these types of upgrades.”
“But after the last few races, we now have a very clear idea of what we need to do with the car to make it easier for the drivers to control it, making sure it goes where they want it to go when they’re on those important qualifying laps,” he pointed out.
“We’ve also got a pretty good set of upgrades coming over the next three or four races. There is a lot of hard work going on, but we hope to start seeing the fruits of it soon.”
Looking ahead to the next race on the calendar at Imola, Shovlin gave his thoughts on what Mercedes can expect in terms of how suitable the W15 might be at the upcoming tracks, with one venue in particular offering a potential opportunity to get the car into the right frame.
“Next is Monaco, Montreal and then Barcelona,” he explains. “You have two tracks that are predominantly slow corners, certainly Montreal. And then you have Barcelona, which with its new look, where they removed the chicane, is an extremely fast track. Lots of medium speed turns and very, very, very fast turns.
“So a big range to deal with. We don’t expect to go to Monaco and suddenly look extremely fast. But what you can find is that subtle differences in those tracks can reveal those weaknesses a little less.”
“If you’re going somewhere like Montreal, you’re only working one gear range, it can be a little easier to get the car in the frame. We are all doing normal work in preparation, but fundamentally, we have to develop a way out of this problem by introducing performance upgrades to the car.”
“That’s what we’re working on. And then on the track we will just try to optimize what we have as best we can, win as many points as possible in the meantime. These are actually the two areas we are working on at the same time.”
