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Mercedes F1’s head of trackside engineering, Andrew Shovlin, has claimed that the team has “aerodynamically revolutionized” their 2022 challenger in the last few races, compared to the start of the season.
Shovlin believes the W13 is “quite a different beast” now and believes it to be capable of competing at the front. Speaking to Motorsport Magazine ahead of the 2022 F1 British GP last weekend, he said:
“In terms of the concept of the car, we’ve actually changed our car an awful lot since it first ran, it’s behaving very, very differently to when it first ran. Even though if you look at it from a distance it looks quite similar to what we had at round one, aerodynamically it is quite different beast now.”
Mercedes have fared much better in the last few rounds after struggling with porpoising throughout much of the earlier rounds. The Silver Arrows seem to have finally found a solution to control the violent bouncing without losing too much performance.
In his home race at Silverstone, Lewis Hamilton seemed like a genuine contender for victory and could have potentially taken his first win of the season had it not been for a late safety car intervention.
Following their improved performances in Canada and Britain, Shovlin expressed optimism about their performances going into the rest of the season. Describing the team’s experience so far this season in trying to understand their car as “interesting”, Shovlin said:
“They were quite interesting from a point of view of understanding what’s not right with the car at the moment. And in previous years we’ve won championships by designing a car that works well over the average track. You’ll have seen that often we weren’t the best in Monaco, we weren’t the best in Mexico.”
He added, saying:
“But when we came to your bog-standard racing circuits, we were always there or thereabouts. And we’re always going to aim to do that with this car. But we’re not where we want to be with that at the moment.”
Mercedes “were just fighting to survive” at the start of the 2022 F1 season
Mercedes were reportedly just “fighting to survive” during the first few rounds of the 2022 F1 season, after their aerodynamic concept backfired and failed to yield the desired performance, according to Andrew Shovlin. Speaking to Motorsport Magazine, he said:
“In the first few races, we were literally just sort of fighting to survive. And the drivers were fighting to survive with a car that was incredibly difficult to work with. But we did a decent job there of scoring points, actually, and picking up on the opportunities when others were unreliable.”
Despite their lack of performance to compete up front, Mercedes have remained one of the most consistent teams on the grid this season, having scored points in every race so far this year.
