The scorching weather in Budapest will test the W15, claims Mercedes

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin insists that the weekend's Hungarian Grand Prix race will be a "test" of the team's progress.

Following a difficult start to the season, Mercedes has managed to improve its car, the W15 that has been extremely sensitive to slight changes to the weather conditions.

However, a raft of changes to the car that has been constantly introduced since the Imola F1 round, has delivered an enormous step forward.

George Russell claimed his first pole position of the year in Montreal, followed by another one at Silverstone. While the Briton was forced to retire from the British Grand Prix, his team-mate Lewis Hamilton managed to deliver the first victory for Mercedes in 2024.

At Silverstone, Mercedes not only appeared to be brutally quick over a single qualifying lap, but Russell and Hamilton managed to escape into the distance in the opening stages of the race.

While the British Grand Prix weekend took place in unusually cold conditions, this weekend's Budapest F1 round is set to be staged in extremely hot climatic conditions. Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin insists that the hot weather will deliver an answer for whether Mercedes has made gains in hot conditions that have caused difficulties previously.

“If you look at what is the big difference for Hungary is probably this is the test of whether or not we have got on top of our long-run performance in hot conditions.”

“In Barcelona and in Austria, we couldn’t match Lando or Max on the long runs. Both those two cars were well ahead of us.”

Expanding on his expectation, Shovlin insists that it will be difficult to replicate the form shown at Silverstone in the hot race of Budapest: “Now we hopefully will have made a bit of progress. If you look at the size of the gap at those two previous races, I’d be surprised if we can pull it in that significantly.”

“But then again, we surprised ourselves with the first stint in Silverstone. We didn’t think in that dry bit of the race will be able to break away. We thought it would be like Barcelona where George got into the lead and then he’s got the two of them in his gearbox.”

“But that track [Hungary] throws up different demands, we can simulate some of those problems, we know the type of issues that it will throw our way and we’ll just put up effort into the preparation side and making sure that we can start with the best set-up that we can and how do we develop it from there,” said Shovlin.