Mercedes always believed that its W15 car would be fast, and they were surprised that they could not use their potential at the beginning of the season .
The German manufacturer went into the summer break with three wins in the last four races, George Russell won the Austrian Grand Prix and Lewis Hamilton did it in the British and Belgian GPs. The success came after a series of upgrades arrived in time for the Monaco Grand Prix that helped unlock the better balance characteristics of the car the team was aiming for. .
Mercedes race director Andrew Shovlin believes the key to the team making the breakthrough was simply making gradual progress in understanding how to unlock the potential they knew their car had.
“It wasn’t that much of a watershed moment,” Shovlin said. “We always thought this car, in its day, looked fast.”
“But being able to do it all weekend was a bit of a challenge for us at the beginning of the year. Now it is more usable.”
“It is not a single development. It’s a lot of things that we’ve done to try to solve those problems.”
“Like I said, we were surprised that we weren’t faster at the start. We thought we made a good car, but underneath it was a good car. He just had some problems that we had to solve. Now we are seeing the result of that hard work.”
Shovlin believes that progress with their car accelerated after Mercedes had a good understanding of what was needed to be fast.
“It’s just a feature of how well the organization is doing,” he asserts. “A lot of success in Formula 1 is linked through learning and ideas.”
“At this point, the learning rate has been high this year and the generation of ideas has been good. Ultimately, that’s where all the new parts and new developments come from.”
Mercedes has also been helped by getting a better correlation between what its wind tunnel and simulation predictions are saying about what’s happening on the track.
“The better your models are, the better you can develop off the grid,” he notes. “As we said, we have many different models, and the correlation is never perfect, but that’s an area where we’ve definitely seen progress.”
“That ability to model what the car is going to do is one of your best ways to develop these days, when you don’t have endless amounts of tunnel testing or track testing.”
