Lewis Hamilton made a request to his Mercedes team after a frustrating outing in Saudi Arabia, and the Silver Arrows have listened.
Mercedes have responded to Lewis Hamilton’s calls for ‘big changes’ after the Saudi Arabian Grand Prix. Ahead of Sunday’s race in Australia, trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin explained that the Silver Arrows were looking into ‘more fundamental’ alterations after an underwhelming start to the season.
During the early stages of the Bahrain Grand Prix weekend, Mercedes looked well-set to challenge Red Bull on the odd occasion and stamp their authority on the battle for P2 in the Constructors’ Championship. However, the first two races have been a wake-up call for the Silver Arrows.
Instead, Toto Wolff’s outfit are locked into a battle with McLaren for the title of the third-fastest car with just two points separating the two teams in the standings. George Russell’s strong performance in Bahrain also contributed to most of these points, with Hamilton finishing ninth in the drivers’ championship. After a difficult performance in Jeddah, Hamilton shared his thoughts on the W15. “It’s certainly tough, but we’ll keep our heads up and keep working hard,” he told Sky Sports F1. “I know everyone at the factory is doing their best, but there is no doubt that big changes need to be made. “We may not have made big enough changes. You look at the three teams ahead of us, they still have different concepts to where we are in some areas. So we’ve got some performance to add, that’s for sure.”
Thankfully for the seven-time world champion, his team have taken notice and the staff back at Brackley are already working on radical solutions to the W15’s issues. However, if Hamilton is to end his 12th and final season with Mercedes with a victory, they will need to claw back considerable performance relative to Red Bull.
Discussing Mercedes’ new thought process ahead of the Australian Grand Prix, Shovlin explained: “We started to converge back in the general direction of where we came from arriving there. But the learning of it is just that when you change things you can see the differences. So when changes are made to the car, you can see how it behaves on every drive. “You can also look at the overall performance of the two cars, and basically the limitations they both had in qualifying and in the race were about the same. So it’s not a small difference, it’s not a small difference. ” Camber, spring, or rod here and there. It’s something more fundamental that we need to address and understand.
