2023-07-12 16:11:00
At Silverstone, Lewis Hamilton took the podium for the fourth time this season. Technical Director of the Mercedes team James Ellison summed up the British Grand Prix, answering questions from fans.
Q: Did the new front wing work as expected or could it be better?
James AllisonA: It’s too early to answer this question. The new front wing was designed to make the car faster – all new items are aimed at this. But the specific characteristics of the new front wing are also designed to improve the car’s balance in slow corners.
Silverstone is famous for a lot of things, but not for a lot of slow turns. However, on the slow part of the track, we looked quite competitive, so we can put a tick in front of the new front wing’s effectiveness.
However, we will get a better idea of the new product at the next stage in Hungary, where almost the entire track consists of slow turns. But early signs look promising, and the front wing appears to be working as expected.
Q: Why did George Russell start on Soft tires?
James Allison: It’s probably more correct to ask why our riders started on different tyres. If Soft turned out to be a good choice for George, then why didn’t Lewis start on these tires? Or why didn’t George start on Medium if that lineup was good for Lewis? Why did we split the strategy?
Even at the beginning of the weekend, we saw a few things. First, all tires showed approximately the same speed. The Soft line-up looked a little better in the first laps of the segment, but towards the end there were problems with it. With the Hard line-up, it was the other way around, and Medium was somewhere in the middle. However, all three compositions were very similar in their characteristics.
We decided that if we split the strategy, putting one rider on Soft, and the other on Medium, then this will increase our chances of a good final result. On Friday, Soft performed well on a long series of laps, and since George started ahead of Lewis, we decided to increase his chances at the start so that he would try to overtake someone. That is exactly what he did, ahead of one of the Ferrari drivers.
On the other hand, it made no sense for Lewis to try to overtake his partner at the start, since the team would not have gained anything from this. So we chose Medium for it, knowing that it would give the best odds over the long distance in a race we were planning to do with one pit stop.
The solution worked great for Lewis. He drove a long first stretch, and by the time the safety car left, he had not yet been in the pits, which ultimately played into his hands. The division of the strategy increased the chances of the team and each of our riders individually for a good result.
Q: What setup changes did the team make on Friday night? How much did Mick Schumacher help with this by working on the simulator?
James Allison: Over the years, the work that we do on the night from Friday to Saturday becomes more and more important during the race weekend, and at Silverstone proved to be especially important.
In Friday practice, we saw that our car is very good at the race distance – both pilots showed a high and stable pace, and the tires worked efficiently. We knew that we had picked up very good basic settings for the race, but at the same time we understood that on one fast lap the car did not have enough speed, and something had to be done about it. We didn’t want to drastically change the settings so as not to lose racing pace.
It was the solution of this issue that the team was engaged in on the night of Saturday on the simulator. The engineers and Mick Schumacher worked until 2am to find a way to make the car fast on one fast lap in qualifying without changing the fundamental settings for the race. We could change the tire pressure, the flap angle, things that can be changed in the “closed park” mode between qualifying and the race.
Great work at night by our team, thanks to which the pace in qualifying increased, and on Saturday our riders were able to compete in front, but at the same time we still had good car settings for the race.
Question: Why did Lewis run the final stretch of the race on Soft tires?
James Allison: We knew we could do a lot of good paced laps on Soft tires. We saw this with George early in the race with a full tank of fuel in his car. He had good speed, and at the same time the tires did not wear out much.
But most importantly, we knew how difficult it was to overtake at Silverstone. There are a lot of fast, smooth corners on the track, but the straights aren’t long enough for the DRS effect to be big enough. As a result, there is little chance of overtaking.
We figured Lewis’s best chance of overtaking Lando Norris would be through faster tire warm-up after the safety car left the track. We didn’t know for sure, but we assumed Norris would get Hard tires and we knew we’d be in good shape on the Soft.
As a result, on the first laps after the restart, we got a speed advantage over the McLaren before the Hard tires warmed up to the optimum temperature. If you saw the first laps after the restart, you noticed that even without DRS, Lewis was incredibly close to overtaking. But we were not fast enough to make it possible, and Norris was able to pull away from Lewis when his tires warmed up to operating temperature. Our bet didn’t work out, but it was fun and we almost made it.
Question: Is there a chance that with further updates the team will be able to stay ahead of the main rivals until the end of the season?
James AllisonA: The simple answer is yes. We have many more car updates planned for this season. Of course, all the teams will begin to pay more and more attention to next year’s car, which will slow us down a bit in the update race. But everyone knows very well, and in our case it is exactly the case, that we will be able to use all the new products that we will put on the current car next year. In fact, we invest in both seasons.
So yes, you will still see updates on our machine. I think the rivals will also continue to bring new items. In the upcoming races, the balance of power will change a little in our very tight group of teams, so new items on one car or another can give an advantage until another team introduces their updates in a stage or two.
Let’s see where we end up in the final third of the season. I hope we will be ahead and have a strong second half of the year.
We will continue to study the novelties of other teams. We have hundreds of photos at our disposal, in which we are trying to understand what changes occur from race to race, so we notice something unusual.
An interesting and unusual fact about the new McLaren, thanks to which they went very fast. It is very unusual when someone manages to take such a big step forward in improving competitiveness in the middle of the season. I take my hat off to them – they did a great job.
At the same time, this is a very interesting situation for us. We have pictures of them before and after updates, and we know how much lap time they managed to play. McLaren’s results like this have led us to take a closer look at their car than we usually do, to see what they can do to improve and whether we can apply their solution to our car.
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