Mercedes racing director Andrew Showlin denies that any upgrades made by Mercedes this year have drastically changed the performance of the W15 as he believes they have had the car they needed from the start of the current season.
Entering the 2024 season, the German team expected to return to winning ways and start a fight against Red Bull for the title because in 2023 they redesigned the problematic W14.
However, they re-entered with a big gap behind the reigning champions, while Ferrari was the first challenger to Red Bull. In that period, Mercedes was fighting with Aston Martin, so it was assumed that they would have another season to forget.
The turning point happened at the Monaco Grand Prix where the upgrades came. Soon the W15 was showing clear signs of becoming an extremely competitive car, so the first pole position, the podium, and then the victory arrived.
The Silver Arrows overtook Ferrari and caught Red Bull and McLaren, which was the fastest pack on the grid. But towards the end of the first part of the season, Mercedes overshadowed both teams because it recorded three victories in 4 races and put itself in a position that should be seriously counted on in the sequel.
The racing director of the Silver Arrows explains how they knew and thought they had a competitive car, but the beginning of the season was challenging in maintaining the necessary performance.
“There was no eureka moment. “We always thought this car was fast, but being able to keep it that way all weekend was a bit of a challenge for us at the beginning of the year,” said Shovlin.
“It’s more usable now, it’s not because of one development, it’s about a lot of things we’ve done to try to solve those problems. But 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; it just had some issues that we had to fix and now we’re seeing the results of that hard work.”
Shovlin praised Mercedes’ ability to roll out upgrades to every race without any real problems with new parts.
“The tempo is very high at the moment, which is simply a characteristic of a well-functioning organization.”
“A big part of success in Formula 1 is related to learning and ideas, and right now the pace is high. The generation of ideas was good and ultimately that’s where all the new parts and new developments come from,” he explains.
The Mercedes race director emphasized that improving the correlation between the wind tunnel and the track is a key advantage for his team.
“The better your models are, the better you can develop off the grid, and like I said, we have a lot of different models.”
“Correlation is never perfect, but it’s an area where we’ve clearly seen progress and that ability to model what the car is going to do is one of the best ways to develop these days when you don’t have an endless tunnel or track to test.”
