Unlike George Russell, Lewis Hamilton received engine penalties this weekend at Monza. In question: the damaged power unit of Lewis at Spa, following his contact in the first lap… Lewis Hamilton has already said that this wasted power unit was of his own doing, apologizing to the team for insisting on continuing to drive.
Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes’ chief race engineer, clarified the power unit: it’s not officially out of the game, but further analysis was due this weekend.
“On this power unit, we lost the water pressure, and it turned off the power unit, as you may have heard during the race. The unit is still at the factory and undergoes detailed checks. We’ve had other issues with items in the total power units – issues that didn’t put them out of commission, but certainly dampened our enthusiasm for running them. »
“Reliability has been one of our strengths. And just taking into account the odds, we think that at some point in the rest of the year we would have taken a penalty with Lewis, which is why we decided that Monza would probably be a better track for the take. Since you have long straights and some hope of overtaking. »
Mercedes followed a disappointing performance at Spa, a struggle for victory at Zandvoort, and some recovery in qualifying at Monza. How does Shovlin analyze such pure performance variation?
“Spa was quite interesting, it was quite painful at the time, but we’ve often said that our worst weekends are the ones that reward us with the most learning afterwards. When you see these variations in performance, from lap to lap, you can start to see, even with GPS, which corners you’re wasting time in, and in what speed range, you can start to understand how your car is performing. And you can get a glimpse of how competitors’ cars perform. »
“The lessons we have learned give us an indication of where to develop the car in the future. At Zandvoort we expected to be more competitive. So it was reassuring that it happened like that. But the problem is kind of rooted in the way we developed the car, it’s related to how it works as an aerodynamic package. And this problem as such, you cannot solve it in fifteen days. »
“So again we anticipated that Monza would be a difficult circuit for us. We hope it won’t be as difficult as Spa, but that kind of drop in performance we think is mainly due to the change in downforce level from circuit to circuit. »
2022: a useful apprenticeship for the W14
So what lessons from 2022 will be learned for the development of the W14, next year’s Mercedes?
“Those lessons, that learning are all very valuable and we like to keep that within the team. It was a very interesting trip. We were overly optimistic about how we thought we could run the car. The car we launched had a lot of downforce on the ground, and there were a lot of problems actually getting the car to run on a circuit. »
« It’s no secret that other teams have tried to get their cars off the ground, to try to make them better able to deal with the bumps, and then to avoid them hitting the ground, because you lose so lots of grip once it all goes through the flat bottom. »
“But it is also a question of seeing how the car is balanced according to the passing speeds, in the different phases of the corner. And in general, we just haven’t had enough performance with our car. It’s not just that we’re creating downforce in the wrong places on the car, we’re just lagging in performance. »
“So there are a lot of areas that we have worked on. This year, the focus was relatively early on learning those lessons, to ensure that we regained a competitive position for next year. And the signs we’ve seen over the last six or seven races have been encouraging. We are not where we would like to be, but the direction seems good, so we are working very hard to try to improve that. »
After struggling to win titles, now Mercedes is struggling with itself… At the same time, Mercedes has to take strategic risks to win Grands Prix, like at Zandvoort. Would Shovlin almost enjoy it more?
“We had conversations on Sunday morning from Zandvoort, about where we would be willing to take a risk, to try to create an opportunity to win the race. It was really the first Sunday this year that we had these kinds of conversations. So it’s good to get back into that mindset where you’re trying to look at an alternative strategy that might open a door to create that opportunity. »
