The last update package for the Mercedes W15 appeared to give the team a boost in Austin when George Russell qualified second for the sprint, despite setting his time early and leaving himself vulnerable to being beaten.
However Lewis Hamilton was caught out by a yellow flag and slipped back to P7 on the final grid.
The Austin updates are focussed on the floor, which has been a major talking point for Mercedes after the last version as introduced at Spa was dropped and then swapped on and off the car in subsequent races.
Trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin said that the latest iteration was developed from the Spa floor.
“It’s not a sort of fundamentally different concept,” he said. “It’s an evolution of that floor from Spa. It’s not the only change on the car. Hopefully, it’ll be a big enough step that the performance will be obvious.
“We’ve done all the work that we can to be confident that this will be a step forward. Running it and seeing that you get the results you expect in terms of the pressures and the loads, seeing that you make a step forward on the timesheets.
“That’s all part of the box ticking exercise. But to get us to this point, we’ve done as much work as we possibly can to confirm that it should, it should be okay. And yeah, we’ll learn this weekend, and we’ll continue to learn into Mexico.”
Asked by formu1a.uno if there is anything else to come for the Mercedes W15 he said: “We’ve brought pretty much everything we’re going to bring to the end of the year now.
“That’s not to say that in and amongst the learning that you get across the races, we won’t be making further changes, but there’s no major updates planned for us from here on in.”
Shovlin admitted that the Spa floor hadn’t brought much performance, and the timing of introduction was influenced by the fact that the team needed to replace the previous examples, which had done a lot of miles. So a switch was made to a new spec despite it not bringing a significant advantage.
“Before the break, we had a really good momentum, and we’d hope to carry that into the second part of the year,” he said. “Other teams were bringing updates this side of the break, and I think that inevitably had a bit of an effect on us slipping back.
“We’ve done a lot of work looking at that Spa package now, and it wasn’t a big step. Part of the reason we did that was because the floors that we’d introduced in Miami, by that time, were getting very tired. We wanted to make new floors.
“We didn’t have a lot of performance, so we actually went ahead and produced them for what was a relatively small gain.
“The downside of that is it’s hard to know whether you’re making progress. And for one reason or another, we didn’t have great performance in Zandvoort, in Monza, and that was what triggered the decision to roll back. But if we look at it, I think a large bit was our competitors moving ahead of us again.
“When we were quick before the break, we won some races, but we were winning them by the narrowest of margins. We wouldn’t have even said we were the fastest car in Spa. And hopefully this, this will move us back in the right direction. But you’ll see McLaren have got an update here again, so I think they’re the ones that everyone is chasing at the moment.”
Shovlin acknowledged that slow corner performance has been a handicap recently for Mercedes.
“We’re struggling to turn the car in some of those corners, and then that results in the drivers having to sort of finish turning it with the throttle,” he said. “That puts up tyre temperatures.
“So we’re working on those aspects for next year. But this is just more downforce and more downforce tends to make your problems go away, but, you know, there’ll still be things we need to fix.”
Regarding the latest update he said: “It should help a bit. But that’s the thing that we’re really looking at in the development of the next year’s car is, how can we improve the balance.
“Throughout the life of this car, we found that when it’s in it, in its well-balanced window, it’s a pretty effective racing car, and when you slip out of it, we lose a fair bit of performance.
“And if you look at the McLaren, it seems, wherever they go, whatever the session, they nearly always have it working well. And that’s what you’ve got to aim for.”
