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Mercedes

Mercedes make vital change to boost flagging Kimi Antonelli confidence

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin has outlined a critical alteration to the W16 for the Hungarian Grand Prix, something that should help Kimi Antonelli in particular.

Antonelli Hun Friday
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To news overview © XPBimages

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin has explained the team's decision to revert to its pre-Imola specification suspension for the Hungarian Grand Prix.

The Brackley-based squad is looking to arrest the team's worrying slide in form. Kimi Antonelli, in particular, has struggled in the European part of the season, and the Italian is yet to score a single point on his home continent.

It has left the 18-year-old visibly bereft of confidence and searching for answers to explain his sudden and alarming drop-off in performance.

It has also been a difficult period for George Russell, who has not reached the podium in Europe so far this campaign, directly at odds with the four he took in the opening six rounds of the year.

The one outlier for both during that period was the Canadian Grand Prix, where the latter took victory and the former secured the first trip to the rostrum of his fledgling F1 career.

It is something Shovlin called an "inconvenient" fact, given that the anomalous result at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve contrasts against the rest of what the new suspension in the W16 had achieved.

When asked when the switch back to the old version came on the radar, the Briton revealed it was always a possibility.

"In a way, it's always been on the radar," he stated to media, including RacingNews365. "One of the inconvenient facts was that that was on the car in Montreal, where we had a very, very good weekend.

"Now, that circuit is very different to some of the recent ones, but if we look over the past three tracks [Red Bull Ring, Silverstone and Spa-Francorchamps], high speed performance hasn't been where it was.

"The drivers talked about lacking entry stability and then just this general sense that they didn't have the trust in the car that they did earlier in the [season]."

The troublesome suspension was not used in the subsequent rounds after the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix, Monaco and Spain, but Shovlin did concede it has taken Mercedes longer than ideal to reach its recent conclusions.

"With the wet races that we've had, perhaps arriving at that conclusion wasn't as swift as if we'd had a straightforward run of dry races and dry sessions," he added whilst detailing why.

The 51-year-old highlighted how the change for the weekend at the Hungaroring was the next "logical" step for the team to help restore the W16 to Antonelli and Russell's preferred configuration.

He said: "And then on top of that, we had other sets of experiments that we were playing with around the time of Montreal and Austria, but we were starting to get to a stage where the next logical thing is [to] wind back on that change and see if we can recover that stability that they are craving."

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RESULTS 2025 F1 Hungarian Grand Prix - Free Practice 2