Mercedes, other updates at Imola
Ferrari will not be the only team to bring updates to the Imola circuit. Of course, the Red will be the most renovated car, but so will Red Bull and Mercedes they will have news on the Santerno circuit. The team that needs it most is undoubtedly that of Brackley, which has chosen to divide the developments between Miami and the Made in Italy and Emilia-Romagna GP scheduled for this weekend.
The choice is probably explained by the great need to score points already in Florida. Strategy that may have worked: Mercedes, although not producing sparks (Lewis Hamilton and George Russell finished in sixth and eighth place respectively), gave the seven-time world champion a slightly more competitive car, to the point that Hamilton claimed to have completed the best race of the year.
Shovlin’s words
So should we expect a faster Mercedes at Imola? Difficult to answer, because the W15 is the most unpredictable car on the grid. Even track engineer Andrew isn’t sure Shovlinaccording to which Mercedes must first make the behavior of the car more stable in order to then be able to appreciate the updates: “We are working hard on future races to try to bring developments elsewhere too. It appears that the updates have delivered the performance we were hoping to get from the fund. The problem at the moment is that all the other teams are developing their cars: McLaren, with a great package, seems to have made progress; plus our car handling problems make it difficult to see all this performance as a real step forward. From one session to another the machine can behave quite differently and until we can solve this problem the benefits of the updates will be increasingly limited“.
These problems, for Shovlin, could be resolved soon: “After the last few races we have a very clear idea of what we need to do on the car to make it easier for the drivers to manage. And we also have one series of updates that will be made in the next three or four races. We are working hard, but we hope to start seeing the fruits soon”.
