01/08/2025 15:00
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."
