Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin feels that their upgrades paid off which allowed Lewis Hamilton to recover from his 10-second time penalty to win the British Grand Prix. Shovlin has revealed the areas where Mercedes have made improvements as Hamilton took top spot in qualifying and ended the team's winless streak with a great drive in the second half of the race. "It [the upgrades] were quite extensive in terms of front and rear cake tins and all the area around the bargeboards, the floor," Shovlin told RacingNews365.com and other members of the press. "So quite a significant amount of work on the car and we had struggled at recent races. They are circuits that historically we've actually found quite difficult, certainly in recent years. "I think the pace we've seen at Silverstone is a combination of two things. One is we're getting the car back on a circuit where it works well and we have also made a nice step in terms of aerodynamic performance. Those two together are really why you saw us take pole position (first place) on Friday." Shovlin admits Mercedes were quietly confident about their pace after the opening practice sessions and says the team did not change a lot on the car from FP1 to qualifying. "We didn't changed the a car a lot," Shovlin added. "Lewis did a lot of work, Valtteri as well, but Lewis was even in the simulator on on Friday morning having a look at some final items. "From that first running in FP1 going into qualifying were very, very small, talking one or two roll bars, hardly anything. Tuning a little bit on the wing level, but really not a lot. "We didn't do a great job of getting the most out of the tyres when we did the low fuel work on Friday. But we were at least able to do enough in the program to identify it. "The whole approach was really about trying to find a setup that we could put onto the track, it would work well and then we just look at what we need to tune going into qualifying. "But we actually had quite a good baseline, I think the session was very strong. If you look at the headline times you might believe otherwise. "But actually, we were quite confident going into qualifying. Until you have actually done the times you can't be properly confident, but we could see what the issue was and we were able to fix it."
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