07/07/2021
NEWS STORY
Admitting that Mercedes failed to improve its car over the back-to-back weekends in Austria, trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin says that something the German team isn't doing isn't right.
Sunday saw Red Bull score its fifth successive victory, winning with the sort of dominance we have grown accustomed to seeing from Mercedes since the introduction of the hybrid formula in 2014.
In the Styrian Grand Prix the Mercedes pair qualified second and third, but just one week later they were fourth and fifth, out-qualified by both Red Bulls and a McLaren.
Rather than taking even a small step forward between the two races, the German team actually appears to have taken a step backwards.
"We haven't been particularly strong here in general," admits trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin. "That isn't so much evidenced in the gap to where Red Bull are, but just how much pressure we were under really with McLaren and Lando, who did a great job, but ended up ahead of us.
"Austria wasn't suiting the car and we've not made any real inroads into that over the two races here," he added. "That's a bit of a longer-term thing to look at.
"Then also the very soft compound, the C5, wasn't giving us as much in hot conditions on Saturday as we were getting from it on Friday and there's another question there.
"It wasn't so much that we did anything, obviously wrong," he insisted. "But when you look at where the performance was, we would have to acknowledge that there is something we are doing that isn't right.
"We were the makers of our own issues a bit with the poor quantifying," he admitted, "so that made it very, very difficult to be even thinking about challenging Max. Even if Lewis had started one behind him, I don't think it would have would have troubled them.
"So overall, bit frustrating really both from a performance point of view and the fact that we need to keep the car in one piece."
The German team is now working on a number of updates in time for Lewis Hamilton's home race, though the world champion doesn't appear to hold out much hope for a Silverstone upset.
"These past races have been difficult," he said post-race on Sunday, "and obviously he's pretty much just cruising ahead. So there's not really much I can do about that.
"We have a little bit coming, but it's not going to close the gap enough. So we've got to do some more work.
"I'm praying for a different scenario in the next race, but you look at their car, it's just on rails. We're giving it absolutely everything this past two weeks, I've been to the factory each week trying to extract as much as I can from the car. But our car just doesn't go well here for some reason. I really hope that it does in these next ones."