After a tumultuous 2024 season, Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin admits the Brackley squad were “not quick enough” in updating the W15 which put them on the back foot.
Starting the F1 2024 championship almost 45 seconds down on Red Bull at the season-opening Bahrain Grand Prix, Mercedes team principal Toto Wolff admitted the W15 “didn’t have the pace” to challenge the RB20.
It though, wasn’t until the Monaco Grand Prix that they introduced their first big update of the season, a package that included an innovative front wing. That was two races after McLaren brought their first notable upgrade to the track, the Woking team doing so at the Miami Grand Prix.
The new wing was integral in Mercedes winning three of four races from Austria to Belgium only for the Woking team to again fall behind their rivals as the F1 2024 development race played out.
Mercedes clinched a fourth win late in the season when George Russell won in Las Vegas but fell short of the season’s podium, fourth in the Constructors’ Championship.
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Shovlin believes they paid the price for being too slow to upgrade the W15.
“The whole thing of development in Formula 1 is fixing problems, and can you fix them quicker than your competitors. And that’s how you get to the front,” he said.
“If you look at when we brought our updates compared to our main competitors, we were often bringing our big package a couple of races later.
“But if we brought it earlier, it would be a smaller package. So the fact is, on average, over a season, we’ve not been quick enough when we deliver an update, we had a few races where we were competitive, the teams were trying to beat them, bring theirs, and they moved back ahead.
“That’s definitely the main mechanism. I think the start of the season was poor. The car wasn’t well balanced, wasn’t working across a range of tracks.
“We got on top of those issues over the first seven or so races. And then I think we’ve just been in a normal development race over the remainder of the year.”
Mercedes will have a new line-up for the 2025 season with Kimi Antonelli replacing Lewis Hamilton as Russell’s team-mate.
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2025-01-14T13:12:32Z