Hamilton’s breakthrough with car down to better set-ups

Lewis Hamilton has improved his performances with Mercedes’ car in recent races as the team have understood how to set the car up better, says their trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin.

The seven-times times champion only out-qualified his team mate George Russell once over the first nine races. However in the past four Hamilton has done so twice, finished ahead three times and scored his first victory for two-and-a-half years.

Shovlin said Hamilton found the car more of a handful over the first rounds of the season. “I think early on, perhaps Lewis was finding the car more difficult to deal with,” he explained.

“One of the areas that we’ve improved with the car is being able to land the set-up in P1 that’s a good foundation to start building on performance and fine-tuning it. That helps your weekend enormously.

“In the early part of the year, we were making relatively small changes and suddenly the whole car balance left us and we were really struggling. So that certainly helped. And it’s probably fair to say that in the earlier races Lewis was finding it more difficult to set up than George.”

Over the first races of 2024, Mercedes often found their car worked well in a single session when they happened to suit the conditions, then experienced much poorer balance in later sessions when the conditions changed. Shovlin said they understand better how to adapt it now.

“We always thought this car, on its day, seemed to be quick,” he said. “But being able to do that across a whole weekend was a bit of a challenge for us in the early part of the year.

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“It’s now more useable. That’s not [because of] one development, that’s lots of things that we’ve done to try and get on top of those issues. We were surprised we weren’t quicker at the start. We thought we’d made a good car and, underneath, it was a good car. It just had some problems that we had to get on top of and now we’re seeing the result of that hard work.”

He described how the two drivers co-operated to solve the problems the W15 has posed. “There’s a certain driving style that suits these tyres,” Shovlin explained.

“You tend to find that the two drivers are never that far apart on set-up now. So once the car’s in a good window, the same thing’s working pretty well for both of them and between sessions they’re studying what the other one’s doing to try and find where the gains are.

“Through the year the two of them have been working together, early on neither of them wanted to be finishing where we were, and they were able to help each other through trying different experiments with set-up and driving style. And overall you progress as a team and that’s how a team with two drivers works.”

Hamilton said it had taken “great difficulty” to get the car into a shape where it has won two of the last three races. “You just have to keep exploring and keep trying. We tried so many set-ups.

“Ultimately, you’ve got to understand that it doesn’t have to always be bad, but you have to work with people who can make the difference. So [it’s about] communication with the people back in my team, being as detailed as you can be in the debriefs of what the issues are so nothing gets lost in translation.

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“For me, we go back to the simulator, we work on there, we go back to the factory, speaking to all heads of the departments, for example. Just making sure we’re aligned. Head into the wind tunnel and making sure that the people that are working on those upgrades feel like they’re with you on the road and you’re understanding exactly everything and the steps they’re taking to get to where it is.

“That’s what we’ve done and it makes so much more of a joy, because if you just turn up each weekend and there’s a car you’ve got to drive, if you’re a part of the whole development process in the background, it makes it much better when it finally does get to where you want to be.”