By Carlo Platella
The Silver Arrows are coming off a poker of decidedly difficult races, with Lewis Hamilton and George Russell never fighting for victory. On the one hand, Mercedes still have doubts about the effectiveness of the new fund introduced at Spa, while on the other, the street tracks of Baku and Singapore have emphasized a chronic limit of the W15. A major package of updates is coming to Austinbut it will also be necessary to find a better tuning philosophy for certain tracks.
New arrivals
“We have a major aerodynamic package of the car that will arrive in Austin and that we hope will allow us to have a good weekend”. The announcement was made by Mercedes technical director James Allison, with the Brackley team therefore intending to use the month off to complete the updates in progress. In Texas, however, the British team will have to demonstrate that it has freed itself from the spectres of recent developments.
The latest fund brought to Belgium has in fact been compared several times with the previous specification, with the team doubtful as to whether it could have influenced the character of the W15. “This package is subtly affecting the handling characteristics and we hadn’t anticipated it?” commented Andrew Shovlin, head of track engineering, after the Monza weekend. “It’s quite difficult to verify because the car behaves differently from track to track. On some tracks it behaved very well, while on others we struggled with the balance, regardless of the aero package.” The Austin package will therefore offer Mercedes the opportunity to verify whether the development guidelines are not compromising the driveability of the car.
Singapore’s difficulties
Factory work in the coming weeks will also focus on chronic overheating of the rear tiresa problem that on a track like Singapore, full of low-speed restarts that are particularly stressful for the rear end, came to the fore. Allison explains: “Once again we suffered from something that was problematic for us: with the softer compounds and on tracks where tyre temperatures are sky high and it is very easy to overheat them, we lose competitiveness compared to our opponents. Singapore is extreme in this respect. and for us it was something quite difficult to manage”.
The good news is that the last Grand Prix has fully exposed the problem, allowing Mercedes to now use the month-long break to study countermeasures with the set-up. The technical director concludes: “We will try to understand how to alleviate what has afflicted us this weekend and how to make the tires work better on this type of circuit prone to overheating. On top of that, we’ll also have a lot of work to do to complete our final update package of the season.”
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