‘Wacky’ Hamilton-inspired F1 set-up gamble may have hurt Mercedes’ race

Mercedes suffered its fourth defeat to Red Bull in as many races at the first of two races in Austria as Max Verstappen dominated to claim a commanding victory ahead of title rival Lewis Hamilton.

Speaking after the race, Mercedes head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin revealed that the team had explored a “fairly wacky” set-up approach that could have exacerbated its tyre degradation issues and explained the performance drop off compared to Red Bull. 

“We’ve had difficulties here before but often they’ve been because we’ve had insufficient cooling or last year we had an electrical loom that was degrading with vibration,” Shovlin said. “So they’re often not related to performance.

“It is a difficult and quite peculiar circuit and Red Bull are normally strong here. But we’re also exploring a fairly wacky direction with the set-up as a radical approach, which I think was maybe a bit better on the single lap.

“The question that remains is whether we’ve hurt our degradation and we need to look at that in the next day or two.”

Shovlin explained that Hamilton spent time in the Mercedes simulator following the French Grand Prix to test out what he described as being “brave and original” set-up avenues.

“Essentially the window that we work in was much, much wider,” he added. “We were sort of going further than we’ve ever gone and just really understanding the effects of that.

“Lewis, before he came here, was doing a lot of work in the driver-in-loop simulator and it looked like an interesting direction.

"An important part of this year for us is adapting well to every track and we do need to be a bit brave and original with set-up direction to do that.”

With Pirelli moving a step softer with its tyre range for this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix, Mercedes’ main focus in the short turnaround between events is trying to understanding exactly what impact the new set-up direction had on its rear tyres.

“The one big area is understanding this set-up departure that we’ve taken and whether or not that has made life more difficult for the rear tyres in the long run,” Shovlin said.

“Some of that we can just do by data. But we’ll see whether or not there’s work that’s going to carry into the Friday of the race weekend.

“Fundamentally, the car’s very similar but there are additional challenges of extracting the grip out of that C5 compound, the very softest rubber on the single lap. That might be quite challenging if it is very hot here.

“We’re not looking for massive margins,” he added. “We were down by a couple of tenths in the race and there’s a bit of degradation. But the solution to both of those problems might be the same thing.

“We’ll just try and get the rears running a bit cooler and look after the rubber a bit better and you may find that both of those things come our way. So we will focus on those areas and it’ll just be a case of seeing if we can come back a bit stronger in a few days’ time.”