Which is the best car in Formula 1?
Red Bull’s RB20 undoubtedly was when the season began. Ferrari’s SF-24 looked the like next-best thing to begin with, but McLaren’s Miami Grand Prix upgrade turned its MCL38 into a genuine rival.
Now a new contender has emerged: Mercedes have won the last two races with their W15. Although the first of those came about partly due to circumstances, the second was clearly down to pace.
The team says it has more upgrades to come for the final two races before the summer break. Are we about to see the former champions definitively displace Red Bull as F1’s fastest team?
Mercedes: “Linear progress”
Although Mercedes have only recently joined the front-runners, the potential has been building since the season began in the view of trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin.
“We’ve been chipping away at this from race one in Bahrain,” he told the official F1 channel. “There were a few notable problems we had to get on top of.
“We were bouncing really badly in the high-speed corners in Jeddah. We’ve suffered a lot with rear tyre overheating – we wouldn’t say that we’ve solved that, yet, but we certainly got it much more under control. But the progress has been quite linear. To the outside world it looks like it’s very non-linear because suddenly we’re appearing on the podium and we’ve won a couple of races recently.”
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In the third year since the current technical regulations were introduced, Mercedes’ technical director James Allison said they finally began to make progress once they solved a key underlying problem with their car’s concept. Now that’s been done, Shovlin said the team can incrementally improve their performance race-by-race – as they did so effectively during their championship-winnings campaigns of the 2010s.
“The ‘performance machine’ is working really well,” said Shovlin. “Everyone is looking for performance in every area and I think part of the reason that we’ve been able to make relative progress against everyone else is just that all the key performance areas of the business are delivering.
“Not just the wind tunnel, but we’re delivering on the mechanical side, we’re delivering in terms of weight, in terms of getting a car that works around a range of conditions, managing the tyres better.”
Their rivals have observed the same trend….
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