Mercedes not ruling out further upgrades for 2021 F1 car

The German marquee introduced what was expected to be the final update for its W12 challenger at the British Grand Prix, which helped Mercedes close the gap to main rivals Red Bull. 

Lewis Hamilton claimed a fightback victory to cut Max Verstappen’s championship advantage down to eight points, while Mercedes has trimmed its deficit to Red Bull to just four points. 

After securing a first win since May’s Spanish Grand Prix, Mercedes technical director James Allison revealed that small performance updates could still be in the pipeline for introduction this year. 

“We came home from the weekend pretty chipper about the upgrade,” Allison said. “Is there any more to come? There may be here and there, but in the vast sort of main industrial effort of our development programme – that was the last big package that we will bring this year.

“But there will be a few tweaks here and there, where we can see efficiently that we can bring some performance without distracting us from the big effort that is now going into next year's car.”

Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin said the “quite extensive” upgrade package - which included new front and rear ‘cake tins’ and updates to the bargeboard and floor - worked as well as the team had hoped. 

“The big one for us was that we brought an update kit to the car, we were going to a circuit that's historically suited our car very well, certainly suited Lewis very well, and the bit that was quite frightening coming in was if we didn't perform well, we were going to have to a long, hard look at ourselves,” Shovlin explained. 

“So aside from the championship situation and the points that were at stake, and the need that we had to make sure that that gap wasn't going to grow any further... we were absolutely desperate to see the car perform well, the team perform well, so it's hugely reassuring to have been able to demonstrate that we're still in the fight for the championship.”