During Friday practice for the Belgian Grand Prix, the Mercedes team tested the updated underbody of the W15 car, but refused to use it for the remaining days of the race weekend. Mercedes chief race engineer Andrew Shovlin said the team now plans to bring new products to the first stage after the August break at Zandvoort.
Andrew Shovlin: “The reason we took the new underbody off the car at Spa and essentially brought the W15 back to Silverstone specification was because we had a really good race at Silverstone. The Spa and Silverstone circuits are very similar in terms of corner speeds.
In addition, we saw that the new floor caused certain problems. Now we believe that these problems were not related to the characteristics of the new product, but to the specific settings we used in Spa. All this led to some swaying of the car in fast corners and balance problems. But after returning to the Silverstone configuration, the car returned to normal.
Now we have a lot of time at our disposal to analyse the collected data. We will then be able to understand exactly what we did wrong and I am confident that we will put this floor pan back on the car in Zandvoort.”
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
