F1 News
Mercedes draws hope from race pace: 'On a long run, everything gets hotter'
- GPblog.com
After a strong weekend in Brazil, the pace in Abu Dhabi came as an unpleasant surprise for Mercedes. The W13 struggles when the track temperature cools and may suffer in the race. Andrew Shovlin does still draw hope from the fact that the team has focused the set-up on race pace.
In the first and third free practice sessions, Mercedes still seemed to keep up with the pace quite nicely, but by nightfall the W13's performance deteriorated. "We had a solid FP3, looking like we were sitting between the Red Bulls and Ferraris on single lap pace so it's disappointing to end up 5th and 6th," Shovlin explained in a Mercedes press release.
Mercedes hopes for stronger race pace
"Through the weekend it has felt like we are at our best on the hot track and struggling to find the grip in the cooler evening conditions," he continued. This was reflected in the result of qualifying, in which Lewis Hamilton and George Russell had to concede over six tenths to Max Verstappen's pole time.
However, Shovlin draws hope from the fact that Mercedes has tuned the car for the race. "The decisions we made with the car setup are biased towards race pace, and on a long run everything is running hotter anyway so we're still hopeful that we can have a race where we are looking forwards not backwards," the Briton states. However, he does stress that there is a lot of work to do for both drivers if they hope to compete at the front.