Mercedes F1 began the season confident, tackling initial challenges through dedicated effort.
Andrew Shovlin refutes the notion that a single upgrade by Mercedes F1 this year drastically altered the performance of the W15. The team’s trackside engineering director explains that a series of minor developments accumulated to achieve this result, following a highly disappointing start to the season.
“There wasn’t really an ‘eureka’ moment,” Shovlin stated. “I believe we always thought this car was fast, but maintaining that speed throughout an entire weekend was somewhat of a challenge for us at the start of the year.”
“It is now more usable, and it’s not down to a single development; it’s a multitude of things we’ve done to try and address these issues. But as I said, we were surprised not to be faster initially.”
“We thought we had built a good car and indeed, at its core, it was a good car; it just had a few issues that we needed to address and now, we are seeing the results of that hard work.”
“Numerous models” aid correlation
The engineer praises Mercedes’ ability to introduce enhancements at every race without facing significant issues with these components: “The pace is really high right now, which is simply a reflection of the organization functioning well.”
“A large part of success in Formula 1 is tied to learning and ideation, and currently, the pace is high. The generation of ideas has been strong and ultimately, that’s where all the new parts and developments come from.”
Shovlin emphasized that improving the correlation between wind tunnel and track was a critical asset for Mercedes: “The better your models are, the better you can develop offline and, as I said, we have a lot of different models.”
“The correlation is never perfect, but it’s an area where we have clearly seen an improvement and this ability to model what the car is going to do is one of the best ways to develop nowadays, when you don’t have countless tunnel or track tests.”
Mercedes F1 Sure of Strong Start, Overcomes Issues Mercedes F1 Sure of Strong Start, Overcomes Issues
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