The Japanese GP was an unflattering yet confusing race for Mercedes. They finished the race in the positions they started – P7 and P9. Lewis Hamilton, starting P7, lost 2 places to finish P9, and George Russell did the opposite. The inconsistencies of their W15 played spoilsport yet again, rendering them useless against Ferrari and McLaren. Mercedes Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin described the Suzuka outing as “poor” but didn’t have a concrete explanation for it.

Going into Japan, it was clear that Red Bull and Ferrari would be the top guns. But even McLaren emerged quicker than Mercedes, handing them an embarrassing result at Suzuka. Both Hamilton and Russell suffered understeer and were having trouble in slow corners.

Addressing the same, Shovlin said in the race debrief on YouTube: “We haven’t fully understood the problem yet, but we’re working on it. That is one of the tasks we will be dealing with in the next few days, to find out exactly what happened and why we fell behind so much more than, for example, Leclerc, who drove a very good first stint, which was much longer was.”

He also elaborated on how their performance wasn’t in line with the plans. “The big program we were looking at was to get the car a bit more predictable through the weekend. And what we found is that we can get it in a window but if the wind changes, the track changes, it quickly falls out of it. And that was leading to poor performance in race and qualifying. There’s no doubt that we are not where we need to be.”

After addressing the failure of the Japanese GP, Shovlin spilled the beans on what the Silver Arrows tend to do in preparation for the Chinese GP.

Lewis Hamilton & Co expect a “big challenge” at the Chinese GP

The Chinese Grand Prix is returning to the F1 calendar after 5 years. The last iteration of the race in Shanghai was won by Lewis Hamilton. Interestingly, the 7-time champion has won the race 6 times in his career, the most by any driver. But in the last 5 years, the face of F1 has changed. And so has Mercedes’ place in the pecking order.

“It’s not just that we haven’t been there for a while but we are straight into a sprint race and its also a new format where you’ve got 2 Parc fermes,” Shovlin said about the Chinese GP.” But we are reviewing the historic data. We’ve not been there with this generations of cars so the tires are different, the aerodynamics is very different.”

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“The bulk of that work gets done in simulation,” he further added. “But there is also just a bit of re-reading old notes. But we’ve got only 1 hours of free practice before we go straight into Qualifying. So definitely a big challenge.”

The kind of underperformance that Mercedes has shown in 2024, the Chinese GP could only be a good outlier if their rivals fail to collect the right data from the solo practice session available.

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