Mercedes does not expect a repeat of problems in Spa

Andrew Shovlin, chief race engineer at Mercedes, believes Monza should be less difficult than Spa, although the features of the two circuits are somewhat similar.

In Belgium, Lewis Hamilton retired and George Russell finished fourth, losing race winner Max Verstappen by almost half a minute. At Monza, the cars will also need to be tuned for low downforce, but Shovlin believes the problems they encountered at Spa will not be repeated this time.

“Basically the aerodynamic settings will be very similar, we’ll use smaller wings and when the cars have wings like that, the level of downforce is slightly reduced,” said the British engineer. “At the same time, we are optimistic about the upcoming race, in the hope that the specific problems we had in Spa due to the roughness of the track would not arise in Monza.

We believe that we can achieve more efficient machine operation. At the same time, we have to admit that Red Bull is doing very well in that area: the RB18 is fast on both straights and corners. And here on the circuits that require a bit of pressure, all the problems come to the fore. It’s hard to predict where we’ll end up, but while we probably won’t be as strong as at Zandvoort, we can hope that the difficulties we encountered in Spa won’t be close now.

There are always several factors that influence the speed. One is related to the fact that we keep upgrading the car, trying to gradually fix the problems we had at the beginning of the season, and gradually it’s getting faster and faster.

But at Spa you saw that we struggled in qualifying, after which we were able to determine what changes to the car’s design have prevented us from achieving optimal W13 performance on such tracks.

In Belgium we were forced to increase the ground clearance slightly because there were problems on some bumps in the track, which ultimately reduced the efficiency of the chassis. Then we decided to put in a bigger wing, although that wasn’t ideal, but because the downforce in the back of the car was better, it could handle the corners better, but on the straights we lacked speed.

In Zandvoort it was already easier to find the optimal settings, there were no problems with the build-up on bumps, everything was fine in this respect. Racers were confident, able to attack at full power, so last weekend was probably one of the most successful for us. This is of course encouraging – let’s hope we can perform just as well on other tracks.