How Mercedes found 'joy' in years of F1 struggles

Mercedes' process of fixing the problems that have plagued its F1 cars since 2022 is "more fun" than winning championships, reckons Andrew Shovlin. 

Since the ground effects rules were introduced in 2022, Mercedes has struggled to be consistently competitive, going winless in 2023 for the first time since 2011, although a recent up-turn in form has allowed both George Russell and Lewis Hamilton to scoop victories, in Austria and Britain, respectively. 

The team has shown strong performance since Canada where Russell qualified on pole position, taking podiums at every race across a variety of tracks with different characteristics as it aims to close the gap to third-place McLaren in the constructors' standings. 

Trackside engineering chief Shovlin, who also worked for the team during its Brawn GP guise, believes the rebuilding "challenge" is more enjoyable than simply winning at will.

"It has been a fairly long road, but it has been a road with pretty linear progress on it," Shovlin told the F1 Nation podcast. 

"To the outside world, it looks like it's very nonlinear, because suddenly we're appearing on the podium, and we've won a couple of races recently.

"The team has got much more focused, the performance machine is working really well, everyone is looking for performance in every area. 

"Part of the reason that we've been able to make relative progress against everyone else, is just that all the key performance areas of the business are delivering not just the wind tunnel, but we're delivering on the mechanical side, we're delivering in terms of weight, in terms of getting a car that works around a range of conditions, and managing the tyres better. 

"It's a lot of fun. And in a way, this challenge, there's elements of this that are more fun than all those years of winning, because when you're winning everything, you don't have the contrast.

"If you say how have we done it, it's that we've got a group here at Brackley and at Brixworth that are just hugely motivated to get Mercedes back to winning championships."

Not just the front-wing

In Canada, Mercedes ran a new front-wing, dropping the low-drag design it started the season with, as performances have improved since it was introduced.

However, Shovlin believes simply claiming this as the solution to its problems of unlocking the W15 would be incorrect.

"I mean, there hasn't really been one [single thing]," he said.

"What we have done well has been delivering three or four updates to practically every single race for about the last eight or nine races. 

"Some of them are mechanical, some of them are aerodynamics, some of them will be to help the bouncing or improve the ride. 

"In the last four or five races, and you don't know that you'll succeed every time, but we've plunked a car on the track in FP1, and it's been there or thereabouts. Then you can just start the set-up work with the drivers of fine-tuning it, following the evolution of the track as the grip comes up. That has certainly helped us.

"When the rear tyres were running hot, we had to understand why that was happening, there were a few baked-in problems which you just don't fix those things in three days of winter testing in Bahrain.

"It took a while for us to pick those off one by one, and as I said, the performance development rate has been strong. 

"We can keep that going for a bit longer. But the big question is, how long can we keep putting performance on the car at the rate that we have been?"