Mercedes explains ‘first step’ of Imola upgrades to challenge Red Bull

Mercedes will unveil their first major upgrade of the season at this weekend’s race in Imola and the team’s Technical Director Andrew Shovlin has revealed how these updates should put them back on track to compete with Red Bull.

The eight-time world champion is currently in third place in the championship 96 points – 128 points adrift of leaders Red Bull – and traveling to Imola with just one podium this season – Lewis Hamilton’s second-place finish in Melbourne.

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Their form so far this year has prompted team boss Toto Wolff to call the W14 “Toxic when driving”while her seven-time world champion driver Hamilton admitted it was him after the Miami GP count down the days until Mercedes brought the upgrades.

And in speaking Team debriefing On Mercedes’ YouTube channel, Shovlin revealed that the decision on these upgrades was made back in Bahrain, with the aim of giving Mercedes a new “direction” for the development of its car.

“Well looking back at the Bahrain test, the Bahrain race, we realized we didn’t have a package that would allow us to fight for a world championship,” said Shovlin.

“And we continued in the same direction of development, we wouldn’t end up in a position where we felt we could challenge Red Bull.

“Around that time we made some decisions about how we were going to design the car – how the car would work aerodynamically, how we would design the characteristics of the car, how it would behave in terms of driveability.”

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“What we will put on the track at Imola is the first step of this work. Wind tunnel development takes quite a long time, you can’t just do these things overnight.”

“But the Imola package is the first step in that direction. We hope to bring more updates later in the year. We hope it’s faster, we hope it’s better in terms of qualifying and race pace.”

“But as I said, the key isn’t just updating the lap times. We want to go in a different direction of development, which we believe in the long run gives us a better chance of achieving this challenge for race wins and world championships.”