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Mercedes confirm their upgrades had the desired effect at Silverstone

James Allison has revealed Mercedes' upgrades that were brought to the British Grand Prix worked as expected as they closed the gap to Red Bull in both championships.

Mercedes chief technical director James Allison has confirmed that the team's floor and bargeboard upgrades worked, as they hoped at the British Grand Prix as they ended their winless streak with victory for Lewis Hamilton at Silverstone. The defending champions were clearly second best to Red Bull at the two Austrian rounds but were able to fight with their rivals, even before Hamilton clashed with Max Verstappen on Sunday. "Yes, that is the simple and short answer," Allison answered when asked about whether Mercedes' developments had the desired effect on the team's race debrief video. "We brought a decent aero package to the track, we definitely saw an improvement in our performance and we were very happy with it. "Whether the performance was a little bit more or a little bit less than we imagined is really hard to tell because you don’t get the luxury of performing a controlled experiment. "You don't run the old package and the new package several times doing back-to-back tests with fresh tyres each time, because the weekend just doesn’t give you that luxury. Nevertheless you do and are able to make some comparison because you make measurements on the car with all the sensors. "You can compare back to the weekends before and look at the performance of the car before and compare to the one that you had this weekend and it did all seem to be behaving very well. "If you then look at the stop watch, you could seen that just relative to the field we had moved forward this weekend, we were able to close some ground on Red Bull and we were able to have a more competitive weekend as a result. We came home from the weekend pretty chipper about the upgrade." Hamilton's win and Valtteri Bottas' podium meant Mercedes cut the gap from 44 points to four points to Red Bull in the Constructors' Championship. Allison admits Mercedes will not bring any more major updates to the W12 for the rest of the season but plans to tweak the car are still on the cards. "Is there any more to come? There may be, here and there but the vast sort of, the main industrial effort of our development programme, that was the last big package that we will bring this year," said Allison. "But there will be a few tweaks here and there where we can see efficiently that we can bring some performance without distracting us from the big effort that is now going into next year's car.”

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