Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin has analysed seven-time champion Lewis Hamilton’s strong comeback. After a disappointing end to his 2021 season, the British driver was ready to come back fighting in 2022 to battle it out for the championship title again. However, the Mercedes W13 was riddled with issues as the ground effect era began. Now, after two seasons with no race wins, Hamilton has secured the victory at both the British and Belgian Grands Prix.
At the beginning of the 2024 season, Hamilton seemed to be overshadowed by his teammate, George Russell, with Mercedes ranking fourth overall. However, a notable shift occurred over the last eight races where Hamilton scored an impressive 123 points, second only to Max Verstappen’s 141 and closely following Oscar Piastri’s 126.
Speaking to the media during the Belgian Grand Prix weekend, Shovlin explained, as quoted by Crash.net:
“I think early on perhaps Lewis was finding the car more difficult to deal with. One of the areas that we’ve improved with the car is being able to land the setup in FP1.
“That’s a good foundation to start building on performance and fine-tuning it that helps your weekend enormously. In the early part of the year, we were making relatively small changes and suddenly the whole car balance left us and we were really struggling.
“So that certainly helped and it’s probably fair to say that in the earlier races Lewis was finding it more difficult to set up than George.”
Key to the drivers’ mutual improvement was their collaboration, as both Hamilton and Russell shared insights and experimented with different setups and driving techniques.
“I think there’s a certain driving style that suits these tyres. You tend to find that the two drivers are never that far apart on set-up now, so once the car’s in a good window the same thing is working pretty well for both of them.
“Between sessions they’re studying what the other one’s doing to try and find where the gains are.
“But through the year the two of them have been working together early on. Neither of them wanted to be finishing where we were and they were able to help each other through trying different experiments with setup and driving style.
“And overall you progress as a team and that’s how a team with two drivers works.”
Hamilton is currently in the sixth position in the Drivers’ Standings with 150 points ahead of Red Bull’s Sergio Perez with 131 points and Russell in eighth with 116 points.