Mercedes chief Shovlin acknowledges: 'Hamilton found that harder than Russell'

Shovlin saw difference between Hamilton and Russell

For much of the first half of the season, Russell generally outperformed his teammate in both qualifying and racing. However, Mercedes came up with some successful updates and also made a change in its approach to the race weekend, which proved very helpful for Hamilton in particular.

"I think early on perhaps Lewis was finding the car far more difficult to deal with," Shovlin said in a conversation with various media outlets, including GPblog. "One of the areas that we improved with the car was being able to land the set up in FP1, to give a good foundation to start building on performance and fine-tuning it that helped the weekend enormously."

"In the early part of the year, we made relatively small changes. Suddenly the whole balance of the car was off and then we were really struggling, so this definitely helped. It's probably fair to say that in the earlier races, Lewis was finding it more difficult to set up than George," Shovlin concluded.

This article has been written in collaboration with Matt Gretton