Mercedes has had a faster and more consistent car of late
Mercedes Formula 1 trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin says that improved correlation between the Brackley simulator and the track is one of the keys to the W15’s recent form.
In Montreal George Russell took pole position and earned third place, and then in Barcelona Lewis Hamilton secured his first podium of 2024 with another third. Russell continued the trend by qualifying fourth for the Austrian sprint race on Friday, albeit almost 0.4s shy of pole on the short track.
A new front wing made a big difference, and crucially the car has been doing what the simulator predicted it would do at each venue.
“I think we’ve got good correlation on the simulator now,” said Shovlin. “So you treat each circuit separately in that regard.
“We’ve been bringing developments to the car, some of them are mechanical, so we don’t need to declare those [to the FIA].
“But bringing a string of developments to the car, it’s a different thing every track we go to. That’s been the case for five or six races now. And you’re having to sort of tune it to get it all to work together.”
The team quickly found a good set-up in Barcelona, which was key to a successful weekend there.
“You get more confident the more tracks where you manage that,” he said when asked by this writer about the importance of hitting the sweet spot early in the weekend.
“But we had a car previously that if you got it in the window, it only took a change of wind direction or track temp, and suddenly the thing didn’t balance, and that was why we would look good maybe on a Friday, and then suddenly we’re struggling on Saturday.
“With the changes that we’ve made the car inherently behaves a bit more normally. The drivers aren’t complaining about oversteer in one area, understeer in another.
“If it’s a general issue with a car, it’s easy to chase, if it’s understeering everywhere, we can fix that. So it’s definitely easier to work with.
“But the key thing is the correlation on the simulator has improved, and we didn’t stand a chance before, because if five degrees of track temp, or a 30-degree rotation in the wind put you out of balance. It’s no surprise that the simulator was struggling to capture all of those effects.”
Shovlin says that improving correlation has been an ongoing target for the team.
“You’re constantly working on the correlation in the simulator,” he said. “To the extent where the drivers will finish a race weekend, they’ll come to us on Monday, Tuesday, jump in and they will help us work on getting the correlation to match the car that they just had at the weekend. Then move on to Silverstone, and start looking at that.
“It’s definitely a big factor, because that is where you develop cars these days, by and large. It’s a lot easier when you’re racing all the time and you’ve got data coming in to confirm that the things you’re doing are actually making the car go quicker.
“We can look at where we’re finishing, gap to pole, and that’s matching what we’re finding on the sim, which was we’re genuinely adding performance.
“It’s difficult over a winter when you haven’t got that check of how do you stack up against the competition?
“But as I said, that was an area that was difficult early in the year, it does seem to be in the right direction now.”
Regarding improving correlation he said: “A large part of it is getting an accurate representation of the tyre, an accurate representation of the car itself. There’s a huge amount of detail in the tyres that you’ve got to get right if you want the models to feel similar.
“And they are not just about, can you match the speed trace by messing around with the grip level so it lands in the right place? It’s about making sure you’ve got a physical representation of the car and the tyre, and that that is behaving broadly the same as it does on track.”
Shovlin also confirmed that the drivers have more confidence in the W15 than previously.
“I think that’s definitely a big element of it, because what the drivers used to talk about was a lack of stability, no confidence in the car.
“Now they’re actually going out on new tyres and often saying they didn’t hit the corners hard enough, and there’s more grip than they thought. So they’re definitely more confident in it.”
He added: “We’ve definitely found development directions that have made us quicker, as does every team. The question is, are you developing as quick as the others? When we had a car that that inherently didn’t really want to balance, you couldn’t get it working well around all the corners on a circuit, then it is just a difficult thing to deal with.
“So far beyond the correlation, we now have a car that that works sensibly in low-speed and high speed and mid-speed and braking is okay.
“There’s always areas to improve, and you’ll always be chasing someone, or you certainly are most of the time. But it, but it does seem to be that the improvements to the car are the thing that also helped in that correlation exercise.”
Meanwhile the only new aero part declared by the team for Austria is a revised beam wing, designed for lower drag.
“It’s not really circuit specific in that there’ll be other places that we run it,” said Shovlin. “But it just allows us to achieve a lower drag level with the same upper wing.
“So it’s just to sort of tune it. But you come here and you’d run less drag normally than Barcelona. It’s just to suit the track.”
Adam Cooper F1 