Mercedes investigating "wacky" set-up that may have "hurt" its Styrian GP

Lewis Hamilton in his Mercedes in Austria — Photo: © LAT Images

Styrian Grand Prix

Mercedes investigating "wacky" set-up that may have "hurt" its Styrian GP

Mercedes is trying everything to overcome Red Bull

Sam Hall

Monday 28 June 2021 12:44

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Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin has revealed the reigning seven-time F1 champions explored a 'wacky and radical' new set-up in Styria in its bid to overcome Red Bull.

Lewis Hamilton's second-place finish to Max Verstappen at the Red Bull Ring was the fourth consecutive defeat for Mercedes, its longest streak without a victory since the introduction of the current turbo-hybrid era in 2014. Conceding the team had expected to trail Red Bull on outright pace, Shovlin revealed the extremes Mercedes had gone to in order to minimise the points damage.

“It is a difficult and quite peculiar circuit and Red Bull are normally strong here but we were also exploring a fairly wacky direction with the set-up, a sort of radical approach which I think was maybe a bit better on the single lap," explained Shovlin.

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“The question that remains is whether we’ve hurt our degradation and we need to look at that in the next day or two.”

Pressed for further clues as to what this direction could be, Shovlin added: “I don’t really want to go into details.

"But essentially the window that we work in was much, much wider. We were going further than we have ever gone and [were] just understanding the effects of that.

“Lewis, before he came here, was doing a lot of work in the driver-in-the-loop simulator and it looked like an interesting direction.

"But an important part of this year for us is adapting well to every track and we do need to be a bit brave and original with set-up direction to do that.”

Mercedes "not searching for massive margins"

Hamilton trailed Verstappen by over 35 seconds at the finish although that gap was artificially increased from 15 seconds on the penultimate lap when Hamilton stopped for fresh tyres in a successful bid to secure the fastest lap point.

Despite losing out to the biggest winning margin seen at the Red Bull Ring in F1, Shovlin is confident Mercedes does not need to make wholesale changes to compete.

Ahead of the second race at the venue this weekend, albeit with Pirelli's tyres a step softer compared to the Styrian event, Shovlin added: “Fundamentally the car is very similar.

"But there are additional challenges of extracting the grip out of that C5 compound, the very softest rubber, on a single lap.

"That might be quite challenging if it is very hot here and the other thing is we’re not looking for massive margins.

“We were down by a couple of tenths in the race and there was a bit of degradation but the solution to both of those problems might be the same thing.

"We’ll just try and get the rears running a bit cooler and look after the rubber a bit better and you may find that both of those things come our way."