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Austin Sees Major F1 Upgrade from Mercedes

Mercedes F1 Unveils Major Upgrade for Austin Finale

26/09/2024

Mercedes F1 is rolling out a significant upgrade package in Austin, aiming to boost performance as the season concludes.

Mercedes F1 hopes to progress further with a new upgrade package arriving in Austin. James Allison, the team’s technical director, states that these innovations will be crucial for the Brackley team as the season ends.

“We will try to understand how to mitigate what failed us this weekend, how to make the tires work better on these overheating tracks, and we will also do a lot of work to fine-tune our final evolution of the season,” Allison declared.

“We have a quite significant package with new items for the car in Austin which, we hope, will allow us to have a decent weekend, so we need to deliver all this and prepare for the last races of the year.”

The drivers have shown frustration with the performance of the Mercedes, and Allison understands: “I think, like all of us, they are tired of the car not being particularly competitive in race configuration.”

“It was good in qualifying, but not in the race. We suffered again from a problem unique to us, namely that with softer compounds on tracks where tire temperature is very high, where it’s very easy to overheat, we lose our relative competitiveness.”

“And Singapore is at the extreme limit of this experience, which has been quite difficult to manage for them. And to make matters worse, 30 degrees of atmospheric temperature, 70% relative humidity, it was very hot in the car and by the end of the race, they were both feeling it.”

“They’re feeling much better now in terms of the heat, you know. An ice bath and a few drinks and they recover relatively quickly, but importantly, the pace of the car is causing them to suffer a bit longer,” Allison noted.

Allison admits that qualifying on the second row made it seem like the weekend would unfold more positively than anticipated on Friday, but it turned out to be an anomaly compared to the overall level of the W15 in Singapore.

“I think the result on Sunday was quite challenging for the team, and Friday perhaps foreshadowed the difficulties we could expect. The anomaly was Saturday, where we managed to move from a challenging Friday to a quite respectable position on the starting grid.”

“Here, I must pay tribute to the factory team, who really helped to turn around a tough Friday, to place us much higher on the grid than Friday would have suggested and to give us a result that, although disappointing, was not disastrous.”

“I would say that the trade-off we made, albeit unintentionally, is that we improved the car for each lap, for qualifying, but it was quite painful afterward on the long runs.”

Austin Sees Major F1 Upgrade from Mercedes

Austin Sees Major F1 Upgrade from Mercedes Austin Sees Major F1 Upgrade from Mercedes

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