Where does Mercedes' resurgence end? 'More to come'

F1 News

Mercedes has found the way up and seems unstoppable for now
23 July at 19:00
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  • Jeroen Immink

Mercedes ares right back at the top of the Formula 1 field after their worst start to the season in years. The Silver Arrows have now won two races and for Lewis Hamilton and George Russell, and added a podium in Hungary. But according to technical director Andrew Shovlin, this is just the beginning.

In Hungary, Mercedes once again managed to cash in on a podium finish. After a lap-long fight ending in a collision with Max Verstappen, Hamilton took his third podium of the season and has now also passed his teammate Russell and Sergio Perez in the standings. After a difficult start to 2024, Mercedes could improve the W15 throughout the season and now fight more closely at the top.

Shovlin not surprised by Mercedes' progress

"I wouldn't say we've been surprised by it," Shovlin reveals. "We set ourselves some very ambitious performance targets to make sure we were competitive enough to qualify on pole and win races by the end of the year. We put in some ambitious plans to meet that in stages with various updates," the technical director said.

More to come according to Shovlin

The start of the season was not how Mercedes imagined. Red Bull, McLaren and Ferrari sometimes seemed half a second faster in qualifying, but Mercedes seem to have fought themselves all the way back. But according to Shovlin, there is no stopping there. "We're flat out developing it you don't know what you're going to be able to bring right to the end of the year because you haven't haven't done that work. There's more of what we've been doing will be will be coming over the next few races, drip feeding it in more than going for big packages but the midterm future is quite exciting still. Lots of areas that we're working on and hopefully those will come through and bring us the lap time that we hope."