Mercedes Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin says taking the race to Red Bull, much like they did in Austin, is the best case scenario for the team when F1 travels to Mexico next weekend. The Silver Arrows looked like the team to beat in the United States after an impressive performance in FP1 , however the rest of the weekend didn't play out like that. Max Verstappen took pole position and the victory, with Sergio Perez finishing third, while Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas had to settle for second and sixth respectively. Although the high altitude Mexico City has played to Red Bull's strengths in recent seasons, Shovlin is hopeful that Mercedes can take the fight to their championship rivals at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez next weekend. "For us, if we can take the race to them like we did [in Austin], that's probably the best case scenario that we're going to envisage," Shovlin told RacingNews365.com and other members of the media. "There's a lot to do, it's such a different circuit and it's such a different environment for the power unit to operate in. "There haven't been many circuits where we've been far off the pace. We've struggled in Monaco, we were struggling in Baku [and] we struggled a bit in that second [race in] Austria. But there are more of them where we can challenge them, and we can challenge for poles. "We know where we've struggled there in the past, we know what we need to be working on in the next week or so, and that's what we'll get stuck into." Hamilton currently trails Verstappen by 12 points in the Drivers' Championship, with five races remaining in the 2021 F1 season.
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