Mercedes busy with updates: 'As soon as possible on the car'

A major update package was introduced by the German racing team in Monaco and Spain, but they have not been idle. At Silverstone, Lewis Hamilton and George Russell drove with a new front wing and in Hungary, the two drivers have a different rear wing, a new wing-end plate for the front wing and modifications have been made to the front suspension.

Battle for P2 in championship

Is this enough to make Mercedes 'the best of the rest'? "I mean, that's what we're working to achieve at the moment. They're coming, I mean, we’re trying to get them on the car as quickly as we can, which is why some of the bits were here, some were in Silverstone. What we've done on the rear wing that's quite specific to this this track. But McLaren were very quick at the last two races, so the goal is try and get ourselves ahead of them, which will put us in a good place for the fight for second," said Andrew Shovlin.

Mercedes' technical director does not have much to fear from McLaren in the World Cup, but mainly from Aston Martin. They were a bit quicker at the beginning, now Mercedes seems to have taken the upper hand. "There'll be track specific elements. We look quite good in Barcelona on max downforce. And hopefully will go well here. But the fact is, you know, you can't design your car for every single circuit. So you’re seeing the nature of the corner speed, whether ride is a big factor can come into it, whether it's an overheating circuit, or one where it's tricky to get the tyres to work, whether the balance is more oversteery, all of those things will change the relative performance."

Shovlin continued: "And then on top of that, you've got a pretty aggressive development race going on and you can see that with the steps that Williams made, that McLaren made, where people are bringing a lot of performance and the phasing of that is starting to juggle the order a bit," he concluded.