Mercedes chief race engineer Andrew Shovlin said in a podcast published by the team that problems with this year’s car were apparent from the first laps…
Andrew Shovlin: “We saw the first signs of problems on the first day of shooting with a new car, which we spent at Silverstone. During the tests in Barcelona it became clear that we were not competitive enough, but we were counting on the update that we were preparing for the tests in Bahrain. And when we put in new items and the car didn’t go any faster, it became clear that we had serious problems.
We worked very hard to solve these problems, the year turned out to be interesting. In Barcelona we managed to take a big step in the fight against the build-up – and we understood which way to go.
Towards the end of the season, after studying the behavior of the car on different tracks, we discovered all its problems. And while some of them remained, these were not new problems, but familiar ones.
Over the past few months we have been working to ensure that the weaknesses of the W13 chassis are not taken over by the W14 chassis. We’ve made good progress and the late season releases, especially the ones in Austin, have helped close the gap to the leaders.
It was important to make sure the new products work exactly as we expected, hopefully this will enable us to release a more competitive car next year.”
Source: F1 News
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