by VALERIO BARRETTA
Mercedes to Holland
There Mercedes is one of the most anticipated cars at Zandvoort. Coming off three wins in the last four grands prix, the Brackley team can also be competitive in Holland, on one of those front-limited circuits that the current W15 seems to like best.
It is perhaps still too early to say that Mercedes is once again a top team (the acid test could be Monza), certainly Toto Wolff’s team has followed a virtuous path that led to solving the “old” problems of the W14 in the winter, the “new” ones of the W15 in the spring and now to being competitive on very different tracks, although helped by lucky episodes (the Verstappen-Norris clash in Austria and McLaren’s errors at Silverstone).
Shovlin’s words
According to the head of track engineering Andrew ShovlinMercedes expected this kind of performance already at the beginning of the year, before discovering the new problems of the W15, so banal that James Allison wondered how the team could have been so stupid not to see them: “This is not just one development. There are many things we have done to try to solve these problems. We were surprised that we weren’t faster at the beginningwe thought we had made a good car. And it was a good car after all.it just had some issues that we had to fix. Now we are seeing the result of this hard work”.
“Much of the success in F1 is based on learning and ideas. The learning rate has been high this year and the idea generation has been good: that’s where all the new developments come from. Also the correlation It’s an area where we’ve seen improvements“. An aspect that Wolff also underlined, and which is one of the key factors in McLaren’s growth. Precisely the model that the Austrian admitted he wanted to be inspired by in the hardest days of 2023, when in Woking they had made a huge leap in performance while in Brackley they remained stuck for the second year in a row.
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