After dominating in the hybrid era since 2014, Mercedes has yet to win any of the 2022 season races due to its radical single-seater concept with the W13. It took several months for them to tame the excessive porpoising that weighed down Lewis Hamilton and George Russell so much, but in recent rounds they have shown great progress with several podium finishes and even a pole position in Hungary.
The Brackley team admits that the beginning of the year was tough, but that they also overcame difficult moments before when they were already winning, like in Singapore in 2015, something that makes them feel the courage to recover.
Silver Arrows chief engineer Andrew Shovlin explained to Motorsport.com that the team has a mindset of thriving from solving problems, even if things have been difficult at times: “It’s good to have a challenge. different, there were circumstances that were not pleasant, and that from within were stressful, more than we expected.
“But actually engineers like to have problems to solve, and there were also periods when we were dominant and had no close rivals where everything was a bit boring and predictable,” he said. “So all those challenges are what help you push yourself.”
“At the moment we have a good pace of development, and if we manage to get back to the front, I think the team will regain confidence, but we just had to improve it in a team that was very strong and took a little hit. It was a difficult challenge , but good for us,” Shovlin continued.
The head of the German team’s engineers agrees that the way in which Mercedes recovered at Marina Bay in 2015 to win a single year later is the type of change they want to repeat: “You talk about downturns like the one in Singapore and, If you ask anyone in the team about the strengths to overcome it, they’ll say it was the work we put in behind it.”
“Then coming back the following season and dominating, that’s the way the team has worked to fix the biggest issues,” Shovlin said. “There are things that have surprised us [in 2022], but I think the strength of the team is its people.”
“That’s been an extraordinary challenge, and we’re all wiser and more experienced as a result of it, so I think in the long run that won’t hurt the team at all,” he said.
However, and although in Mercedes they see the positive side, their boss, Toto Wolff , has no illusions about how hard the start of the course has been. When asked if he thought they got something out of the situation, he replied: “I wish I hadn’t been there.”
“We managed to turn it around, but some things are more trivial than you might think, and others were important for the rebound, which we don’t have anymore,” explained the Austrian. “From an engineering standpoint, it was valuable, but from a human standpoint, it was hard to bear.”
“Because if the best engineers do not understand why the data does not correspond to reality, it is not easy,” he said before acknowledging that they were lost. “It’s not the feeling of being completely, but you think how long is it going to take to understand it? Because the next season is coming.”
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