Mercedes make W15 upgrade declaration after significant package arrival

Mercedes’ Andrew Shovlin has confirmed the W15 is pretty much at the end of its development path following its United States Grand Prix upgrades.

Mercedes showed up with a big upgrade package for the W15 at the Circuit of the Americas, including a revised front wing flap, upper wishbones, sidepod inlet, rear cooling exits, and a new floor geometry.

Andrew Shovlin: Mercedes won’t be making further changes

Austin was the sixth-last race of the season, meaning it’s the time of year when teams have to weigh up whether or not to continue development of their current car or switch focus entirely to the following year’s car – this is down to the allocation of resources within a team, whether personnel or financial given the restrictions of the budget cap.

For Mercedes, that point of moving on has been reached, with trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin confirming the upgrades introduced in Austin are the last planned changes for the W15.

“We’ve brought pretty much everything we’re going to bring to the end of the year now,” he told media, including PlanetF1.com, in Austin.

“That’s not to say that in amongst the learning that you get across the races, we won’t be making further changes, but there are no major updates planned for us from here on in.”

The upgrades coincided with a difficult weekend for Mercedes, with both George Russell and Lewis Hamilton having costly spins – Russell sliding off in qualifying, and Hamilton spinning off at the same corner early in the race.

The snappy behaviour of the Mercedes was evident with the rear of the car proving tricky to control throughout the weekend, but the upgrades aren’t suspected to be the cause of the instability.

Opening up on the floor design, Shovlin confirmed the team had introduced a new design and abandoned the concept introduced at Spa for matters of practicality.

“This is a new floor – we rolled back on the update, the Spa one, for the last two races,” he said.

“Partly [because], once you get into the long haul freight covering two different specs, it gets very expensive because you’re flying floors in enormous boxes.

“So the reason that we sort of made a decision and stuck with it was largely down to freight costs more than anything else.”

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As for whether the new floor is continuing down the path of the intentions from the Spa floor, or taking the development in a new direction, Shovlin said: “It’s not a fundamentally different concept. It’s an evolution of that floor from Spa. It’s not the only change on the car. Hopefully, it’ll be a big enough step that the performance will be obvious.

“But we’ll see, learn what we can about it.”

With the new floor being an evolution of the Spa idea, is it a case of Mercedes taking corrective steps to rectify the reasons for deciding against its use?

“No, because, in the wind tunnel, they’ve just been continuing down and down a development path,” he said.

“With the requirements of the different circuits, there are underlying characteristics of our car that are hurting us on some of those street tracks like Baku and Singapore, where you’ve got those 90-degree corners.

“We struggle a bit, particularly in the race, with those type of corners. A lot of that is our challenge. It’s not really down to what we’ve been doing in the wind tunnel development but, for the areadynamicists, they’ve just been continually working, and the packages are just set at a defined point in time where you commit it to carbon.

“But, from their point of view, the things changing every single day.”

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