Trackside engineering director Andrew Schaublin admits Mercedes’ turnaround for the 2024 season was bigger than the team had expected.
The first eight races of the season had given Mercedes a best result of fifth in a grand prix, and after the Monaco Grand Prix the team had just 96 points. Since then, at least one Mercedes has finished on the podium in every race, with two pole positions and three wins in the last four races, taking a step forward in a result that Chauvelin says came earlier than the team had set out to achieve.
“The most important thing is progress,” said Chauvin. “Where we were in the early races in Bahrain and Jeddah, it was hard to look at the car and understand what it needed to do to go fast.
“We could see that it had certain strengths, but it also had a lot of weaknesses. The team responded to the challenge brilliantly. We knew where we wanted to go in terms of performance level. We knew we wanted to win races, and we had set ourselves the target of getting pole position and winning races by the end of the season.
“We’ve had three wins in the last four races. We’ve had six wins in a row. That was probably more than we expected at that point. We’re really enjoying the racing right now. We’re enjoying the challenge. I think the team has some momentum and we’re looking to carry that into the last part of the season, keep improving and hopefully keep winning some races.”
The win in Belgium came despite Mercedes using the car’s previous specification and removing some of the upgrades after Friday’s practice, but Schaublin says the new parts are a step forward that he believes will still allow the team to stay ahead.
“The reason we brought the car back to Silverstone specification on Friday night was because we had a good race at Silverstone,” he said. “Spa and Silverstone are not dramatically different circuits in terms of the range of corner speeds you can handle.
“We definitely introduced some issues somewhere. We think it was mainly due to the way the car was driven at Spa, not the update itself. It gave us a bit of a bounce around in the high-speed corners and some issues with balance. We went to Silverstone and everything was back to normal.
“Since then we’ve had time to look at the data and understand what we were doing, and we’re confident we’ll be able to move forward with a reintroduction in Zandvoort.”
