Mercedes expect a 'chunk' of development in time for Austrian season opener

Mercedes is looking to bring a significant number of upgrades to their W11 car for the Formula 1 season opener in Austria at the start of next month.

Technical director James Allison has said upgrades for the car have been in development since Christmas, and focus has now shifted to implementing them in time for Austria.

"If you imagine where the launch car was and the car that would have gone to Australia, that was frozen around about Christmas," Allison told technical partner Petronas in a video for social media.

"There was the whole of January, whole of February, March, all making the car quicker in the wind tunnel and also in the design departments.

"We got quite a lot of ideas about how to make it quicker, and quite a lot of those ideas were already in process through the design office before we were forced to shut down nine weeks ago."

Development was temporarily frozen when Formula 1 brought forward and extended the summer shutdown due to the global Covid-19 pandemic.

He continued: "Our challenge now is to make sure that quarter of a year of development can get off the drawing boards and onto the car as swiftly as possible.

"We hope to have a chunk of that for the first race in Austria, and the season that follows will of course take as much of the development as fast as we can get it onto the car in turn."

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