Mercedes facing further hurt in Azerbaijan

Mercedes director of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin has revealed the team is expecting similar challenges in Azerbaijan that hurt its performance in Monaco.

George Russell and Lewis Hamilton had been provided with a glimmer of hope for the rest of the year after being competitive with Ferrari and Red Bull in Barcelona, only for aggressive bouncing through stiffness to blight the Monaco GP weekend.

Explaining the discrepancies, Shovlin said: “Certainly, it was a lot harder to get the car to work around Monaco than it was in Barcelona.

"In Barcelona, we had shown that we had good race pace, even though we know there is still work to do to close the gap to Red Bull and to Ferrari.

"But the challenge of Monaco is the low-speed nature, it’s a very bumpy circuit and we were struggling with the ride of the car.

"That was affecting the confidence of the drivers to carry speed and it just meant that we couldn’t run it as close to optimum as we had been able to do in Spain.

F1 returns to Azerbaijan this weekend for the second street circuit in a row, with Mercedes prepared for another difficult few days in Baku.

Detailing the work behind the scenes in order to make a more rounded package, Shovlin added: "Baku might present some similar challenges.

"We are working on areas though to try and improve the ride, try and be able to run the car a bit closer to its optimum window.

"But we are well aware that in addition to adding base performance to the car, we’ve got to make it work over a wider range of circuits.

"So, these are all things that we are busy with in preparation for Baku but also longer-term because there are other challenging tracks that will come up.

"But all of those projects are being worked on really hard because the team and the drivers are desperate to get back to the front.”

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