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Mercedes director Andrew Shovlin feels that the impact of the upgrades is limited because the car behaves quite differently from session to session. The German squad brought a significant portion of its major upgrade to the car in Miami.
After the race, when questioned by the media, Toto Wolff claimed that the upgrades worked as expected on the Mercedes. However, if we look at the on-track performance, this was far from the truth. Even in the best-case scenario, Lewis Hamilton and George Russell had a car that was the fourth-fastest on the grid.
Compare that to the upgrades brought by McLaren at Miami, which propelled Lando Norris to a race win, the impact seems negligible at best.
As quoted by F1.com, Andrew Shovlin revealed that Mercedes had brought half of the overall upgrade to Miami, and the rest will come in Imola. Shovlin felt that the upgrade had worked as expected, but the unpredictable nature of the car continued to limit its impact.
He said:
"We managed to pull forward about half of our update kit to Miami and then the other half is going to arrive in Imola, and we are working hard on the future races to try and bring developments to them as well. Did it work as expected? Yes, it all looks like it is delivering the performance that we were hoping for from the floor."
He added:
"The issue at the moment is everyone else is developing their cars, so you saw McLaren with a big package and they look to have moved forward and also the handling issues that the drivers are having to battle with are making it hard to really see all that performance as a straight sort of step forward.
"What we tend to find is that the car from session to session can behave quite differently and until we get on top of that, we are always going to blunt the benefit that we can get from these type of updates."
Mercedes hoping to see improvement over the next few days
Andrew Shovlin was, however, quite positive about the prospects of the team in the upcoming races. He felt that the team now has a clear idea of how to make the car work. He is hopeful that in the upcoming races they could see improvements in performance at different tracks.
Shovlin said:
“But after the last few races, we have got now a very clear idea of what we need to do to the car to get it handling a bit more easily for the drivers, making sure it goes where they want it to go when they are on those important qualifying laps."
He added:
“And we have also got quite a good sort of thread of updates that will be coming over the next three or four races. A lot of hard work is going on, but hopefully we will start to see the fruits of that soon.”
Mercedes will be bringing the second part of their major upgrade to Imola. The team is hoping for improvements in terms of the predictability of the car for the drivers. One of the biggest issues that continues to plague the car is how its performance changes too dramatically with conditions.
This is one of the reasons why Mercedes has fallen behind the likes of McLaren and Ferrari as well. It will be interesting to see if the former F1 giant can get back to a decent level of competitiveness soon.
