25/07/2021
NEWS STORY
Having "closed some ground" to Red Bull at Silverstone, James Allison confirms that there will be further "tweaks" to the W12 over the course of the season.
That incident aside, Mercedes appeared to have gained a little ground over the Silverstone weekend, the German team having finally introduced a number of much-needed upgrades, basically the first since Bahrain.
"We brought a decent aero package to the track," says chief technical officer, James Allison, "we definitely saw an improvement in our performance and we were very happy with it.
"Whether the performance was a little bit more or a little bit less than we imagined is really hard to tell," he admits, "because you don't get the luxury of performing a controlled experiment. You don't run the old package and the new package several times doing back-to-back tests with fresh tyres each time, because the weekend just doesn't give you that luxury.
"Nevertheless, you do and are able to make some comparison because you make measurements on the car with all the sensors and you can compare back to the weekends before and look at the performance of the car before and compare to the one that you had this weekend, and it did all seem to be behaving very well.
"If you then look at the stopwatch, you could see that just relative to the field we had moved forward this weekend. We were able to close some ground on Red Bull and we were able to have a more competitive weekend as a result. So, we came home from the weekend pretty chipper about the upgrade."
While we never got to see the true pace of the Mercedes during the race - certainly compared to the Red Bull - Lewis Hamilton's strength in Friday's qualifying session was clear proof that the W12 had improved.
Looking ahead...
"Is there any more to come?" says Allison. "There may be, here and there. But the vast, main industrial effort of our development programme, that was the last big package that we will bring this year.
"But there will be a few tweaks here and there where we can see efficiently that we can bring some performance without distracting us from the big effort that is now going into next year's car."