Mercedes no longer “fighting to survive” with troubled W13 F1 car

The German car manufacturer introduced a series of changes for last weekend’s Silverstone race aimed at building on the progress it made with a first development push in Spain.

And although the squad does not yet quite have the pace to fight Red Bull and Ferrari on equal terms, and clearly still has issues on tight and bumpy street circuits, there is growing optimism within it that the corner has been turned on its woes.

For rather than Mercedes’ entire focus being on dialling out the porpoising that proved a pain for its drivers in the early phase of the campaign, its mindset is now shifting towards pure performance.

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin said: “In the first few races, we were literally just sort of fighting to survive. And the drivers were fighting to survive with a car that was incredibly difficult to work with.

“But we did a decent job of scoring points, actually, and picking up on the opportunities when others were unreliable.

“Barcelona was useful for us because we had something that wasn’t bouncing around on every circuit that we went to. But clearly a recent run of three street tracks highlighted another weakness and, to be honest, we’re just going through it: looking for the problems, and then we’ll try and apply our engineering skills to solving them.

“But I would say that the route that we want to take now is becoming increasingly clear. And that’s encouraging from a development point of view.

“This [Silverstone] update is the first one along the line that we started to create in Barcelona.”

While much of the focus about Mercedes’ development and progress has focused on its zero-sidepod concept, the team has been resolute that its upper bodywork shape has had little role to play in the early season problems.

Instead, the key factor at play has been the management of airflow underneath and around the floor. And in those terms, its approach was overhauled significantly at the Spanish Grand Prix – even though the tweaks it made were not so visibly obvious.

“In terms of the concept of the car, we’ve actually changed our car an awful lot since it first ran,” he said. “It’s behaving very, very differently to when it first ran. Even though if you look at it from a distance it looks quite similar to what we had at round one aerodynamically, it is quite a different beast now.”

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