Andrew Shovlin and Toto Wolff talk through the updates from Mercedes working in Barcelona, while the former is realistic about Canada.
For Mercedes, it all came good in Barcelona, after a tricky start to the weekend. Second and third was their best result so far in F1 2023 with Lewis Hamilton pipping George Russell. An eventful qualifying saw a “tip” on the main straight between the two and the latter failed to reach Q3.
But it was still a great team result in terms of what they achieved in the race behind Red Bull’s Max Verstappen. Of significance was the upgrades introduced in Barcelona following the Monaco GP, which showed good promise at the Spanish circuit. But they are already bracing themselves for a tougher Canadian GP due to the nature of the circuit.
“The fact is that the update kit works very well around circuits like Barcelona with a lot of high-speed performance,” said Shovlin. “Although, the car itself would have still been okay there because we’ve been better at the fast circuits and the front-limited tracks. We ended up with a really good balance and really good race pace”.
“Now, where we are going to go next week, Montreal, it’s a very different circuit. There are more low-speed corners, quite a lot of straight-line full throttle and we would expect more of a challenge there. We are not thinking that we are going in nipping at the heels of Red Bull. We are going in there prepared for a battle with Ferrari, Aston Martin, and maybe even Alpine,” he summed up with a honest feedback.
In Shovlin’s eyes, they are possibly fighting to be the best of the rest but the result in Barcelona was an excellent fillip for the Mercedes outfit from a team and morale perspective. “It was certainly really good fun to be part of that race and to be able to get the double podium as well,” he said.
“We’ve had a few tough races recently and while we brought home a decent amount of points, it is so nice to get both of the drivers back on the podium after a bit of a break. What do we expect from Montreal? As I said, we are thinking it will be more along the lines of some of the earlier races where we were definitely in the bunch with Ferrari, with Aston, and now Alpine look to have joined that group”.
“But it’s great racing there. It will be good fun and we are certainly going to be fighting to find every little bit of performance we can because the way the grid stacks up now you can be P2 or you can be P10, and there are only a few tenths in it. We are looking forward to more exciting racing but certainly we are aware that Canada is likely to be a bigger challenge than the Sunday we just had in Barcelona,” summed up Shovlin.
It will be a bigger challenge in Montreal as he laid out, as Wolff also gives his perspective on the scenario regarding updates which he felt worked as they hoped. The Austrian reckons that they have a good base now to build on and explore with he W14.
“I think it is solid,” said Wolff. “I do believe in the package. It is a new base line. It is where we can continue to work on with certain stability without needing to question certain parts of the car; whether it is the bodywork, the floor, the front suspension…that is now established and that is what is what we are taking forward now”.
“I’m of the belief that this car is now a solid baseline. There is no more talk of change in regulations, raising the floor, bouncing, the factor is a now non-existent topic. We know the direction we should now that we should have gone”.
“Obviously, all that with the car and you can get it very wrong…with the tyres. That is why you see these massive swings between team-mates and swings in performance depending on the ambient track conditions,” summed up Wolff. One might deem it that Mercedes have gone back to basics even though they had a plethora of success in the hybrid era but they are headed in the right direction now.
“I think we had to work through this because we had to discover that the direction we had gone simply did not work,” continued Wolff. “We are a team of people who won eight consecutive Championships who got it wrong last year and we try to find out what it was, we did not understand and things got better towards the end of the season”.
“The regulations got changed which we misinterpreted and so we started from zero. So the learning is tremendously important going forward and I think this will be part of the continuous journey of this team. From my perspective, it is not one season, it is 10 or twenty seasons of this team. That learning as painful as it is or annoying, there is days that feel today absolutely necessary to establish a sustainable base,” summed up Wolff.
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