Mercedes’ turnaround in the course of the 2024 season has been greater than the staff was anticipating, trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin admits.
The primary eight races of this season yielded a greatest results of fifth place in a grand prix for Mercedes, and the staff had simply 96 factors to its title after the Monaco Grand Prix. Since then a minimum of one Mercedes has completed on the rostrum at each race, with two pole positions and a run of three wins within the final 4 races delivering a step ahead when it comes to outcomes that Shovlin says has come ahead of the staff was focusing on.
“The principle factor is the progress,” Shovlin mentioned. “The place we had been within the early races in Bahrain and in Jeddah, it was tough to have a look at the automobile and perceive what it was you needed to do to make it fast.
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“We might see it had sure strengths, but it surely additionally had loads of weaknesses. The staff has responded brilliantly to that problem. We all know the place we wish to get to when it comes to efficiency degree. We knew that we needed to be successful races, and we set ourselves a goal of by the top of the season, we needed to be qualifying on pole and successful races.
“We’ve now had three wins within the final 4 races. We’ve had six podiums on the trot. That has maybe been greater than we had anticipated at that time. We’re actually having fun with the racing now. We’re having fun with the problem. It feels just like the staff has a little bit of momentum behind it, and we hope that we are able to carry that into the ultimate little bit of the season, proceed to develop and hopefully proceed to win some races.”
The victory in Belgium got here regardless of Mercedes reverting to a earlier specification of automobile and eradicating some upgrades after Friday’s observe working, however Shovlin says the brand new components are nonetheless a step ahead that the staff believes it will possibly get on prime of.
“The rationale we reverted the automobile to the Silverstone spec on Friday night time was as a result of we had an excellent race in Silverstone,” he mentioned. “Spa and Silverstone will not be dramatically completely different circuits when it comes to the nook velocity vary that you’re coping with.
“We had clearly launched some issues someplace. We expect that was largely because of how we had been working the automobile in Spa, not induced by the updates themselves. That was giving us a little bit of bouncing within the high-speed corners, in addition to a couple of points with the steadiness. Going to that Silverstone automobile obtained all of it again to regular.
“We’ve since had time to have a look at the info to know what it was that we did, and we’re fairly assured that we are going to be going for a reintroduction in Zandvoort.”
