Andrew Shovlin: It will be harder for us in Hungary

In Hungary, Mercedes chief race engineer Andrew Shovlin spoke about plans for the second half of the season…

Q: You have won two in a row. What are the chances of a third win here in Hungary?
Andreas Shovlin: Not much chance. Silverstone suited our car, there is more load on the front tyres and it was cooler there, and our problems are most obvious in hot weather and more load on the rear. Sunday will be very hot. We are working on that, but I would not put us among the favourites.

Q: So here we learn a lot about the competitiveness of your car?
Andreas Shovlin: Yes, this is a suitable route for such a test. When you are concentrating on solving a problem with an overheated rear tire, it is best to study and understand the situation on the circuit that aggravates the problem.

Q: Are you surprised by the team’s progress in recent races?
Andreas Shovlin: I wouldn’t say we’re surprised. We’ve set ourselves an ambitious target to start from pole and win races at the end of the season, and we’ve developed a plan to achieve this, implementing several changes step by step.

It’s great to see how the whole team has embraced this challenge. All our new products have worked; we are slowly but surely moving towards leadership.

We continue to develop the car. In the next few races we will receive several new products in a smaller range than global updates, and we are looking forward to them. We hope that they will bring us the lap times that we are looking for.

Q: In two of the last four races, George Russell has started from pole. This year he leads Lewis 10-2. Has George improved this year?
Andreas Shovlin: George has always been very quick in qualifying, even when driving for Williams.

Lewis makes no secret of the fact that Saturdays are not easy for him now, that the cars of this generation are not suited to him. He has worked hard for his part. We have done a huge amount of work to make the car faster on the one hand. It was just not fast enough, but on the other hand he had the balance to really attack on the fast lap on Saturday.

And we have made progress. George recently beat Lewis by quite a small margin. It is great for the team that Lewis is back in contention, we will keep working on it. I am sure we will see a few more pole positions for Lewis and Mercedes.

Q: When we talk about the development of the car, are we talking only about aerodynamics, or have there also been changes in the mechanics?
Andreas Shovlin: We also worked with mechanics. We try to focus on every area that contributes to the performance of the machine.