Mercedes plan to reinstall new floor

In brief

Mercedes planning to reinstall removed Spa floor at Zandvoort

After Mercedes removed their updated floor from their car over the Belgian Grand Prix weekend to reinstall a previous specification floor, the team’s trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin says they intend to refit the new floor to their cars at Zandvoort.

“We are planning to do that now,” Shovlin said.

“We essentially reverted the car to the Silverstone-spec on the Friday night. We did that because we had a good race in Silverstone, and Spa and Silverstone are not dramatically different circuits in terms of the corner speed range that you’re dealing with.

“We’d clearly introduced some problems somewhere. We think that was largely due to how we were running the car in Spa – not induced by the updates themselves. That was obviously giving us a bit of bouncing in the high speed corners, a few issues with the balance. Going to that Silverstone-car got it all back to normal. We’ve since had time to look at the data to understand what it was we did exactly and, knowing that, we’re pretty confident that we’ll be going for a reintroduction in Zandvoort.”

Dixon wants more wear at Milwaukee

Scott Dixon says the upcoming IndyCar oval race at the Milwaukee Mile will bring the question of how much tyre wear is best in the series to the forefront.

“Milwaukee will be interesting,” Dixon said. “They’ve really got to work on the formula for those tracks because nobody wants to just follow the leader. Unfortunately, with the repave at Iowa, that kind of ruined the best short track we’ve had for a good five, ten years.

“It will be interesting to see the Milwaukee test for us, almost zero deg as well, extremely hard to pass. We’ll have to see how that plays out. I know they’re talking about bringing a softer tyre.

“Deg is key. You need three or four seconds over a stint. That spices it up, makes it interesting. Firestone don’t want to hear people talking about degradation, but it creates great racing.”

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