Mercedes 'surprised not to be quicker at start of season'

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin has admitted that the team expected to be quicker at the start of the season, and that its initial struggles had been a source of frustration at Brackley.

Mercedes felt that the changes they had made to the car over the winter would improve performance after a tough time in 2023, but Lewis Hamilton and George Russell missed out in podiums in the first eight races.

With no points at all from Australia, it looked like the teamn's season was turning to dust. But then came Canada, withRussell taking a surprise pole and going in to finish in third behind Max Verstappen and Lando Norris.

Since then there has been a Mercedes in the top three in every race, with victories for Russell in Austria and two for Hamilton in Britain and in last week's Belgium GP.

It makes them candidates for 'most improved team of the season', but Shovlin feels they should have hit their stride much sooner and always had the potential in them to take poles and win races right from the start.

• Read also: Mercedes zeroing in on causes behind Russell’s underweight car

"We always thought this car on its day it seemed to be quick," he insisted. "But being able to do that across a whole weekend was a bit of a challenge for us in the early part of the year.

He said the team had struggled to optimise the car's performance across all tyres of corner speeds but that once this was sorted out they had been able to be much stronger and more consistent every week.

"It wasn’t so much a breakthrough moment," Shovlin said. "It's not one development, it’s lots of things that we’ve done to try and get on top of those issues.

"We were surprised we weren’t quicker at the start," he admitted. “We thought we’d made a good car, and underneath it was a good car, it just had some problems that we had to get on top of.

"Now we’re seeing the results of that hard work," he said, referring to six successive podiums and three wins in the most recent four rounds before the summer break.

The slow start to the season means that Mercedes are only fourth in the constructors standings, 79 points behind Ferrari. That would be a lot closer if not for Russell's disqualification in Spa after winning the Belgium GP.

The team is still looking into why Russell's car was found to be 1.5kg underweight after the finish with tyre wear, plank wear, brake wear and oil consumption all being considered.

"The drivers themselves can lose a lot," Shovlin added. "In this particular race, George lost quite a bit of weight."

Despite the disappointment of Spa, Shovlin insists they're not giving up the chase and intend to continue their rapid cycle of upgrades for the W15 which have seen new parts on the car almost every race weekend.

The floor upgrade that Mercedes initially rolled out in Spa but then rolled back due to lack of time to test it in rain-hit practice will be among the new parts that will be back in upcoming races.

"The rate of them is really high at the moment which is just a feature of how well the organisation is working," he said. “The generation of ideas has been good. Ultimately that’s where all the new parts and new developments come from.

“A lot of success in F1 is about learning and it’s about ideas and at the moment the rate of learning has been high this year," he added, with improved correlation between the air tunnel and on-track performance proving key.

“Correlation is never perfect, but it’s an area where we’ve definitely seen improvement," he said. "The better your models, the better you can develop offline. And as I’ve said, we’ve got lots of different models.

"That ability to model what the car is going to do is one of your best ways of developing these days when you haven’t got endless amounts of tunnel testing or track testing.”

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