Mercedes will continue to develop its car "flat-out", says Shovlin

Following a string of impressive results, Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin reveals that the Brackley-headquartered squad will push on with its development route until the very end of the current season.

Mercedes has endured a difficult start to the 2024 Formula 1, having suffered a sizeable deficit to the field-leading Red Bull.

One of the key objectives for Mercedes was to have a car that worked consistently and performed in line with what the team expected. However, the Brackley-based squad struggled to optimise the car across corner speed ranges saw it end without a podium in the first eight races of the 2024 F1 season.

However, Mercedes now find themselves on an upward trajectory. An ambitious development route has seen the German-British outfit overcome its issues and return to the sharp end with six successive podiums and three wins in four rounds.

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin insists the Brackley-based outfit has not been caught by surprise by the improvements.

"I wouldn't say we've been surprised by it. We set ourselves some very ambitious performance targets to make sure we were competitive enough to qualify on pole and win races by the end of the year.

"And then we put in some ambitious plans to meet that in stages with various updates. what has been brilliant to see is just how well the whole organisation has responded to that challenge to try and get us back towards the front and what we have done has delivered.

"It's nice when you're in a situation where all your update kits, all the mechanical changes that we've made to the car have done what we hoped for and it's reassuring that we're sort of seeing that slow and steady move back towards the front.

Explaining which areas of the W15 Mercedes has improved the most Shovlin said that he can't pinpoint a certain component as the team focussed on a number of different parts of the car.

"Well, we've been working on the mechanical package as well. We're trying to focus on every area that delivers performance because you need your wind tunnel to be delivering, but it's only so hard you can make that work.

"Some of the differentiating steps are when you can bring a package that isn't just the aero development that everyone's trying to do. So we've made good gains there, and it's a reflection that the whole team's working well together. All the different functions of performance are all trying to work together to make sure that we can bring updates that do deliver what we need.

Despite the financial ceiling that heavily limits what teams can achieve with their cars, Shovlin insists that Mercedes will push on with the development route until the closing stages of the season.

"Well, we're flat out developing it. You don't know what you're going to be able to bring right to the end of the year because you haven't done that work, but more of what we've been doing will be coming over the next few races, drip feeding it in more than going for big packages, but the mid-term future is quite exciting still.

"Lots of areas that we're working on and hopefully those will come through and bring us the lap time that we hope," concluded Shovlin.