F1 News
Mercedes to join the Ferrari and McLaren party: 'We'll find more lap time'
Mercedes Chief of Trackside Engineering, Andrew Shovlin, comes to a hopeful conclusion after what might have been interpreted as a tough first Friday of the 2025 season for the Brackley-based outfit and signals their rivals that the German team can find more speed ahead of the relevant sessions of the Australian Grand Prix.
In Mercedes' press release, the Briton highlights how the morning and afternoon sessions in Melbourne went for the German team. "The car was behaving well, particularly on the long run and the harder C3 and C4 compounds," before acknowledging that Mercedes still has lap time to find prior to Saturday's qualifying session.
Mercedes confident it can find the lap time required to fight
"Looking at the headline times, we've got some work to do on improving our single lap performance on the Soft compound ahead of Qualifying," however it shouldn't prove to be too difficult a task since the German team already seems to have a sense of where they should go with the setup. "We've already got some areas of focus though and are confident we can take steps to do that overnight."
Mercedes chose to run the hard compound tyres, opposite to its rivals, Ferrari, McLaren and Red Bull Racing, who opted for the mediums, however, Shovlin, like everyone up and down the paddock, sees that the competition at the front will be ferocious. "As was expected ahead of the weekend, it looks close between several teams at the front. We were slightly offset with our tyre choice in FP2 so it's hard to predict the relative order,"
"What we can say though is that even small improvements will likely make a big difference. We will be working hard this evening, and in conjunction with the teams back at Brackley and Brixworth, to do this," Mercedes chief of trackside engineering concluded.
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