Mercedes’ engineering director Andrew Shovlin believes that his team can still take some positives despite a rather slow start to the 2022 Formula 1 season.
Eight-time and reigning Constructors’ champions Mercedes have not had the best of starts to the 2022 campaign. Although the British manufacturer is still in 2nd place on the Constructors’ standings, the team has performed below-par in the first two races of the season.
At the Abu Dhabi GP, Lewis Hamilton managed a podium finish and George Russell came in 4th on race day. But the Brackley team were fortunate in the first race of the season as the two Red Bull drivers in front of them failed to finish the line.
In Jeddah, the Silver Arrows’ problems were further highlighted when Lewis Hamilton failed to make it out of Q1. On race day, the seven-time world champion managed a rather underwhelming 10th place finish. George Russell managed to limit the damage by finishing the race in 6th place.
Although it seems that Mercedes still have a lot of work to do to keep pace with Red Bull and Ferrari, the team’s engineering director, Andrew Shovlin believes that the defending champions have some breathing space between themselves and the midfield pack.
While speaking to reporters after the Saudi Arabian GP, Shovlin admitted that Mercedes were not under any disillusion of the performance gap between themselves and their Constructors’ rivals. “We have no illusions about what our performance gap is [con Ferrari e Red Bull]and in Jeddah it was somewhat larger than in Bahrain,” he said.
Shovlin then explained that the gap created between Mercedes and the bottom half of the table is still quite large so the team can afford to make a few changes and hence, it gives them some breathing space to experiment, “We need to do a good job to stay ahead, but we have a bit of a gap and this gives us some breathing room, allowing us to experiment on the weekends. We want to find solutions to improve the car’s performance. Everyone is working very hard to try to understand the problems.” he concluded.
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