James Allison says Mercedes were a lot chipper after the F1 British GP with regards to their upgrades, but that was their last big push for 2021.
With the gap to Red Bull widening, Mercedes had to push through some upgrades on their car in F1 British GP, which as per the Chief Technical Officer, Allison, worked in a short answer. The data they got from the cars showed promise to fight its rivals.
On track, it looked closer, as Lewis Hamilton took pole on Friday. Even though he lost it on Saturday, he fought back on Sunday until the untimely incident. Despite that, he managed to come back to win, while Valtteri Bottas was up there on the podium too.
Only time will tell how good the upgrades are and if enough to fight Red Bull until the end, but Allison noted of the team being a bit more chipper after the race. They also have to, because, that was the last big upgrade they had for the season.
“I’ll say yes, that is the simple and short answer, that the upgrades worked,” said Allison. “Mercedes brought a decent aero package to the track, we definitely saw an improvement in our performance and we were very happy with it. Whether the performance was a little bit more or a little bit less than we imagined is really hard to tell because you don’t get the luxury of performing a controlled experiment.
“You don’t run the old package and the new package several times doing back-to-back tests with fresh tyres each time, because the weekend just doesn’t give you that luxury. Nevertheless you do and are able to make some comparison because you make measurements on the car with all the sensors and you can compare back to the weekends before and look at the performance of the car before and compare to the one that you had this weekend and it did all seem to be behaving very well.
“And if you then look at the stop watch, you could seen that just relative to the field we had moved forward at Silverstone, we were able to close some ground on Red Bull and we were able to have a more competitive weekend as a result. So, we came home from the weekend pretty chipper about the upgrade. Is there any more to come?
“There may be, here and there but the vast sort of, the main industrial effort of our development programme, that was the last big package that we will bring this year but there will be a few tweaks here and there where we can see efficiently that we can bring some performance without distracting us from the big effort that is now going into next year’s car,” summed up Allison.
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