Mercedes has admitted that the handling difficulties the drivers are facing with its W15 Formula 1 car are “blunting the benefit” of the upgrades it has brought in 2024.
The German marque accelerated the introduction of a revised floor to the Miami Grand Prix last weekend, but it endured another underwhelming showing this season.
Following a Sprint race that ended without a single point being scored, Lewis Hamilton traipsed home sixth with George Russell back in eighth place in the grand prix.
However, Mercedes Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin has claimed the update delivered as expected and it has more planned for the next round at Imola.
But Shovlin conceded that the impact of Mercedes’ upcoming upgrades could be limited until it gets a handle on the inconsistent behaviour emanating from the W15.
“We managed to pull forward about half of our update kit to Miami and the other half is going to arrive in Imola,” Shovlin said on Mercedes’ post-race debrief video.
“We’re working very hard on the future races to try and bring developments to them as well.
“Did it work as expected? Yes, it all looks like it’s delivering the performance that we were hoping for from the floor.
“The issue at the moment is everyone else is developing their cars.
“You saw McLaren with a big package and they look to have moved forward.
“And also, the handling issues that the drivers are having to battle with are making it hard to really see all that performance as a straight step forward.
“What we tend to find is that the car can behave quite differently from session to session.
“And until we get on top of that, we’re always going to blunt the benefit that we can get from these type of updates.
“But after the last few races, we’ve now got a very clear idea of what we need to do to the car to get it handling a bit more easily for the drivers, making sure it goes where they want it to go when they’re on those important qualifying laps.
“And we’ve also got a good thread of updates that’ll be coming over the next three or four races.
“A lot of hard work going on but hopefully we will start to see the fruits of that soon.”
Russell, who was baffled with his uncompetitive pace in Miami, revealed that Mercedes has “overcompensated” with the corrections it made from its predecessors.
“The fact is that the stopwatch doesn’t lie and we know that probably some of the changes we’ve made since the end of last year perhaps overcompensated with some of the development items we did,” he explained.
“We have limitations with the car now which is a totally different limitation to what we had this time 12 months ago.
“We did so much work to solve the problems, we’ve kind of gone too far in that direction.
“We know we need to improve and we need to improve quickly.”
