Mercedes have ‘big long list’ of ideas to bring to revised F1 car

Mercedes finally debuted their long-awaited W14 updates, featuring new-look sidepods after the team moved away from their ‘zero-sidepod’ philosophy, at this weekend’s Monaco Grand Prix.

Despite having only just introduced their first big upgrade of the season, trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin admitted Mercedes have already identified elements “we would have done differently”. 

“We’re very much in the situation of looking at the car we’ve brought here and thinking ‘oh we’d have done that differently if we were doing it again, we would have done this differently’,” Shovlin told Sky Sports F1.

“If you start with a clean sheet, it’s a lot easier to optimise than if you’re halfway through development and suddenly you make a pretty big change.

“So the positive of that is that we’ve got a big long list of things we’d like to do, which we know we’ll bring forward.

“But it’s a really impressive job to get all this to what has now become race six. That was a really good job from everyone in the factory.”

The upgraded W14 hit the track for the first time in opening practice on Friday with seven-time world champion Lewis Hamilton impressing on his way to third. 

Mercedes teammate George Russell struggled for pace and finished down in 15th. 

Shovlin stressed it is too early to draw any conclusions from the new parts at a circuit teams would not usually bring major upgrades to. 

“We haven’t seen major problems which is a useful start to it,” he said. “We were doing some comparisons on set-up across the cars so I think we have a good direction there – Lewis appeared to be in a happier place than George.

“One of the tricky bits with Monaco is the track evolves so much. It’s one thing having the car in a good spot in FP1, you need to keep it there in FP2, FP3 and into Qualy. That’s a lot easier said than done. It’s a good start but we’re certainly wary of the many ways you can get Monaco wrong.

“We’re just playing with the normal set-up parameters here. You don’t design a car for Monaco, you design it for your Silverstones and Barcelonas so the challenge is always how do you take that car designed for another circuit and get it to work around this slow, bumpy very tight and twisty track.

“Monaco is about confidence for the driver. Lewis had that this morning but George didn’t so it’s about working on the tweaks that will bring that.”