Lewis Hamilton has improved his performances with Mercedes’ car in recent races as the team have understood how to set the car up better, says their trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin.
The seven-times times champion only out-qualified his team mate George Russell once over the first nine races. However in the past four Hamilton has done so twice, finished ahead three times and scored his first victory for two-and-a-half years.
Shovlin said Hamilton found the car more of a handful over the first rounds of the season. “I think early on, perhaps Lewis was finding the car more difficult to deal with,” he explained.
“One of the areas that we’ve improved with the car is being able to land the set-up in P1 that’s a good foundation to start building on performance and fine-tuning it. That helps your weekend enormously.
“In the early part of the year, we were making relatively small changes and suddenly the whole car balance left us and we were really struggling. So that certainly helped. And it’s probably fair to say that in the earlier races Lewis was finding it more difficult to set up than George.”
Over the first races of 2024, Mercedes often found their car worked well in a single session when they happened to suit the conditions, then experienced much poorer balance in later sessions when the conditions changed. Shovlin said they understand better how to adapt it now.
“We always thought this car, on its day, seemed to be quick,” he said. “But being able to do that across a whole weekend was a bit of a challenge for us in the early part of the year.
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“It’s now more useable. That’s not [because of] one development, that’s lots of things that we’ve done to try and get on top of those issues. We were surprised we weren’t quicker at the start. We thought we’d made a good car and, underneath, it was a good car. It just had some problems that we had to get on top of and now we’re seeing the result of that hard work.”
He described how the two drivers co-operated to solve the problems the W15 has posed. “There’s a certain driving style that suits these tyres,” Shovlin explained.
“You tend to find that the two drivers are never that far apart on set-up now. So once the car’s in a good window, the same thing’s working pretty well for both of them and between sessions they’re studying what the other one’s doing to try and find where the gains…
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