Shovlin: I hope the new chassis won’t have the disadvantages of the W15

Lewis Hamilton took his victory tally to 105 this year, winning the British and Belgian Grand Prix, giving both him and his fans optimism ahead of the second part of the season.

But this hope was not destined to come true, as after the summer holidays he was never on the podium and his best result so far remains 4th place in Mexico City.

In Sao Paulo, where the race took place on a rainy track, Hamilton finished only tenth, despite George Russell, his Mercedes teammate, even having a chance to win, but he was simply unlucky and in the end The 26-year-old Briton finished 4th

Immediately after the race, the seven-time world champion made no secret of his displeasure with the behavior of the Mercedes W15 and publicly stated that it was the worst car he had ever driven. Nevertheless, Andrew Shovlin, chief racing engineer at Mercedes, is not inclined to dramatize the situation, especially since the technical innovations presented by the team in the US operate more or less normally.

Andrew Shovlin: “Based on our measurements, downforce is at design level for the range of ride height adjustments we used. Everything is fine in that respect, but in Brazil the weather conditions were completely different, but there too we saw that our car was quite competitive at times.

This can first of all be seen in George’s qualifications, because he was able to get on the front row of the grid. But even in the first part of the race, already on a wet track, his car worked quite effectively. But on dry asphalt our results were worse. However, the issues with this series of updates are pretty much the same as those we’ve observed before.

The car’s weaknesses are evident in slow corners, especially on parts of the circuit where such corners follow each other. And in the second sector of the ring in Sao Paulo there are just a lot of similar corners. And we must continue to work on this shortcoming of the W15. However, we did not expect this problem to be solved thanks to the latest wave of new products. We only expected that at this stage of chassis modernization we would be able to slightly improve the basic characteristics of the vehicle.

In general, on the one hand, the new products work as we expected, but at the same time, of course, there are still a number of problems that still need to be solved so that the W16, our next car, is free from such shortcomings. We are working hard on this at the moment and I hope that we can make the appropriate changes to the chassis design during the winter off-season.

During the remaining races of the season we will continue to analyze the behavior of the car, we will look for confirmation of our conclusions about the characteristics of the W15, trying to understand whether we can count on the changes we expect from plan to apply the chassis to have the desired positive effect.

In Las Vegas there will be a lot of straights and slow corners, in Qatar the speeds will be higher and the last race of the season in Abu Dhabi will be held on a circuit that has a little bit of everything, and there we will be able to more accurately assess the level of our speed capabilities.

We will also see which of the competitors has the fastest car, because sometimes Red Bull, sometimes McLaren, sometimes Ferrari is ahead. And this will allow us to calculate the size of the gap between these teams that will need to be made up during the winter months.”