Mercedes explain the form turnaround that led to Silverstone win – and assess their chances for Hungary

Mercedes' Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin has given an insight into how the team have managed to turn their form around in 2024, having gone from a challenging start to the season through to claiming back-to-back race victories in Austria and Great Britain.

The Silver Arrows faced a number of issues with the W15 when the campaign got under way, which hinted at a continuation of the struggles they had endured during the 2022 and 2023 seasons.

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However, their progress has become increasingly noticeable as the year has developed, with George Russell clinching pole position in Canada before scoring the squad’s first podium of the year come race day.

Lewis Hamilton then stood on the rostrum at the next event in Spain, while the Red Bull Ring and Silverstone brought wins for Russell and Hamilton respectively.

Reflecting on how Mercedes have achieved this upturn in performance, Shovlin explained to the F1 Nation podcast: “It has been a fairly long road, but it has been a road with pretty linear progress on it.

“From our side, we're looking at the gaps to all the cars in front of us – race pace, qualifying – and we've been chipping away at this from race one in Bahrain. There were a few notable problems we had to get on top of.

“We were bouncing really badly in the high-speed corners in Jeddah. We've suffered a lot with rear tyre overheating. We wouldn't say we've solved that yet, but we’ve certainly got it much more under control. I think the team has got much more focused.

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“Part of the reason that we've been able to make relative progress against everyone else is just that all the key performance areas of the business are delivering. Not just the wind tunnel, but we're delivering on the mechanical side, we're delivering in terms of weight, in terms of getting a car that works around a range of conditions, managing the tyres better.

“It's a lot of fun. There are elements of this that are more fun than all those years of winning because when you're winning everything, you don't have the contrast. So if you say ‘how have we done it?’ it's that we've got a group here in Brackley, and a group in Brixworth, that is just hugely motivated to get Mercedes back to winning championships.”

Shovlin also praised the team’s ability to bring regular upgrades to the car, though acknowledged that maintaining such a high development rate could prove to be a challenge in the long run.

“What we have done well has been delivering three or four updates to practically every single race for about the last eight or nine races,” he continued. “Some of them are mechanical, some of them are aerodynamic, some of them will be ‘can we do something that helps the bouncing a bit or are we able to improve the ride?’

“There have been lots of different areas. I think the biggest steps came from getting a car that was simply more drivable, but also easier for the drivers to set up. Earlier on in the year, we were very quick in some corners, very slow in others, or quick when the wind was blowing in a certain direction and slow when it changed.

“The big advance now is, in the last four or five races, we’ve plonked a car on track in FP1 and it’s been there or thereabouts. Then you can just start work with the drivers of fine-tuning it, following the evolution of the track as the grip comes up. That has certainly helped us.

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“We'd had other things where the rear tyres were running hot. We had to understand why that was happening. There were a few baked-in problems that you just don't fix in three days of winter testing in Bahrain.

“It took a while for us to pick those off one by one. The performance development rate has been strong. We can keep that going for a bit longer, but the big question is how long can we keep putting performance on the car at the rate that we have been?”

For now the focus remains on the next event on the calendar, the Hungarian Grand Prix, a weekend that Shovlin believes could prove crucial in showing whether Mercedes have managed to improve their performance level in warmer conditions.

“We certainly don't think ‘we won the last one, let's go and win the next one,’” Shovlin commented. “It almost makes you a bit more nervous that maintaining that performance we had in Silverstone is going to be very difficult.

“The big difference for Hungary, this is the test of whether we have got on top of our long-run performance in hot conditions, because in Barcelona and in Austria we couldn't match Lando [Norris] or Max [Verstappen] on the long run. Those two cars were well ahead of us.

“We hopefully will have made a bit of progress. If you look at the size of the gap at those two previous races, I'd be surprised if we can pull it in that significantly. But then again, we surprised ourselves with the first stint in Silverstone.

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“We didn't think in that dry bit of the race we'd be able to break away. We thought it would be like Barcelona, where George got into the lead and then he's got the two of them in his gearbox. But that track throws up different demands.

“We can simulate some of those problems. We know the type of issues that it will throw our way and we'll just put our effort into the preparation side and making sure that we can start with the best set-up that we can and then how do we develop it from there?”

While the Hungaroring could pose some unknowns, one thing for certain is that Hamilton has an outstanding record at the circuit, with the seven-time world champion having won the event on eight occasions.

“It rarely pans out as you expect,” Shovlin said of the Hungarian Grand Prix. “It's one of those races that there's normally an incident here and there.

“Like Silverstone, Lewis has a pretty impressive record there, so it would be wrong to not credit the driver with a bit of the performance around that track.”

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