Mercedes F1's W15 Handling Woes Persist, Shovlin Optimistic

Despite ongoing handling issues with the W15, Mercedes F1’s Andrew Shovlin remains confident in the car’s performance.

Mercedes F1 continues to develop its W15 and remains satisfied with the car. Since the start of the season, the Brackley team has been confident that the car is a very good base, and the track engineering director, Andrew Shovlin, reveals that the upgrades brought to Miami worked very well, even though the team was still the fourth force on the grid.

“We managed to advance about half of our upgrade kit in Miami and the other half will arrive in Imola,” Shovlin stated. “We are working hard to try and bring developments to it. Did it work as expected? Yes, it seems that the performance is up to our expectations.”

“The problem at the moment is that all the other teams are developing their cars. We saw McLaren with a big package and they seem to have made progress. Moreover, the handling issues that the drivers have to deal with make it difficult to see all this performance as a direct improvement.”

“What we tend to see is that the car can behave very differently from one session to another, and until we have mastered this, we will always blunt the benefit we can gain from such updates.”

“However, after the last few races, we now have a very clear idea of what we need to do with the car to make it a bit easier for the drivers, ensuring it goes where they want it to go during those important qualifying laps.”

“And we also have a good thread for the developments that will be brought over the next three or four races. There’s a lot of hard work ongoing, but I hope we will start to see the fruits of it soon.”

Mercedes’ rhetoric of having a clear idea of how to utilize their car has been the same since the beginning of the season, but the results are slow to come. In Miami, George Russell revealed that the team might have wanted to move too far away from last year’s car concept.

“The fact is that the stopwatch doesn’t lie, and we know that some of the changes we have made since the end of last year may have overcompensated for some of the development elements we have done.”

“We have limits with the car today that are totally different from those we had 12 months ago. We have made so much effort to solve the problems that we have gone a bit too far in that direction. We know we need to improve and we need to do it quickly.”