Shovlin: It’s great when the team trusts the riders

Over the weekend George Russell in Brazil opened the scoring with Formula 1 wins, and commenting on the event Andrew Shovlin, chief race engineer at Mercedes, said that he immediately believed in the potential of the then very young George when he started for the first drove their race car. car in 2017 teams on tests in Portugal.

“Honestly, I was at those tests when we first gave George the chance to work behind the wheel of our car,” recalled Shovlin, who took part in the F1 Nation podcast. – I immediately realized that this guy would win races – he drove so skillfully, he understood what to do with tires and how to adjust the steering style.

So now we’re not even surprised. He spent this Grand Prix absolutely calm, which just became confirmation of what we had known for a long time. It is good that this has already happened, because we hope that next year we will not have to wait for the first victory of more than twenty races. We want to fight at the front from the start of the season.

You may also recall that he came close to victory in December 2020 in Bahrain when he replaced the ailing Lewis Hamilton. It wasn’t easy for him that day, but after that he survived everything normally – maybe that story just tempered him.

Of course, when George became the driver of most of our team, he thought that in Mercedes he would immediately claim victories, but in fact it turned out that we had huge problems to solve. We had to understand everything and understand a lot, and George played an important role in that.

It’s great that he won the Sao Paulo Grand Prix and I can say I’m really impressed with how well our drivers have worked together all year, especially in the last three races. They very effectively helped the team to return to this level, and now they both understood that only one of them would win.

But even in the morning before the race, when we discussed strategy, they said, “Develop different tactical plans for us if necessary, we are willing to accept that one of us could be the loser. But we just want the team to win the race.”

In the end, they both only want one thing: real racing, and at the end of the Grand Prix George asked for clarification on the rules of the game. But in reality, they were both ready that we could ask them not to compete, not to attack each other, and then they would have tempered their enthusiasm and just calmly crossed the finish line. Our riders are bound by mutual respect – we see how this weekend in the other team, especially in the sprint on Saturday, there were incidents between partners, after which Lewis and George assured us that they would not allow themselves such a thing.

It’s great when a team has complete confidence in its drivers, allows them to compete on the track, enjoy the fight, and we think there are many more races ahead where both will battle for victory .