Mercedes W15 correlation breakthrough with ‘a route back’ plotted

Mercedes’ Andrew Shovlin has downplayed the team’s confidence heading into the second half of the season, but has highlighted the “good mood” at Brackley.

With three wins in the last four races, Mercedes’ ascendancy in the second quarter of the 2024 championship has seen some pay-off for the decisions made and the lessons learned at Brackley over the past two years.

Andrew Shovlin: Mercedes ‘sees a route back’

Having spent the first two years of the current ground-effect regulations struggling for form and consistency with bouncy and unpredictable cars, a complete change of concept for 2024 has seen something of a resurgence from Mercedes as the W15 has become a multiple race-winner – the first car from Brackley to do so since 2021.

Impressively, the W15 finished the first half of the season as the quickest car as George Russell and Lewis Hamilton made it a 1-2 in Belgium, even if Russell was later disqualified with his car being underweight – likely due to excessive tyre rubber shedding.

It’s been a huge turnaround for Mercedes since last year, when the team’s truculent W14 failed to make much progress forward on its predecessor – leading to Mercedes making organisational changes to replace technical director Mike Elliott with chief technical officer James Allison in a role reversal that had originally gone the other way around during 2021.

Speaking to select media, including PlanetF1.com , head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin smiled when asked by PlanetF1.com whether some of the ‘swagger’ of a team that had won so many consecutive titles between 2014 and ’20 was starting to return.

“I’m not sure we ever had swagger!” he said.

“But I think the enjoyment in what we’re doing is certainly returning. We’ve always, even when we were winning, were well aware that every winning streak comes to an end and we were trying to put it off for as long as we could.

“So I don’t… we’re definitely not in a confident phase but the team’s working really well together. Everyone’s enjoying it and it’s a really good mood in the camp.

“We can see a route through to getting back to where we want to be, but it’ll be hard work because everyone else is trying to win.”

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Andrew Shovlin on how correlation has been at the heart of the bounceback

Mercedes’ mystification over the past two years was also down to issues with the correlation between the data and numbers behind the cars and upgraded parts, with the theoretical gains not becoming a reality on real-life circuits.

Addressing this discrepancy between the virtual and real worlds has been part of Mercedes’ comeback – but it’s not the be-all and end-all, as Shovlin explained.

“Well, it’s a very complicated question because, if you go back to the start of the regulations, if you had a model that captured every element of the aerodynamics of these cars and the bouncing, then you would have been in a great position to develop,” he said.

“But no one would have been in that situation. Early on, it was difficult to correlate, because we didn’t understand the new generation of cars – we’ve had to develop tools to allow us to predict what aero developments that appear good in the tunnel are going to actually do when they get on track.

“We have many different models that we’re using to develop the cars with, so it’s not just a case of whether correlation is good or bad.

“Certain things, we can model very, very well –  other things we are less strong at.

“On top of the correlation, there was just a lot of learning that you had to do around what these cars wanted to get them to be drivable, predictable, and work across a range of tracks and conditions.

“But, you’re always improving the correlation of parts, what we are increasingly confident in is that when we develop aerodynamic surfaces in the wind tunnel, when we bring them to the track, they do what we want.

“We add performance, and we don’t inherit a load of undesirable and unpredictable characteristics. So, in that sense, we’re in a decent place. But you’ve always got to be wary of what you don’t know.”

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