Mercedes moves up a level, Shovlin: “We are further ahead than we would have expected”

Mercedes leads the group of the new F1 era Apart from a few isolated cases, Formula 1 surprised itself in the first three days of shakedown in Barcelona which saw the debut of the single-seaters of the new racing era. And if the kilometers traveled were much more than those expected on the eve, it is certainly the favorite Mercedes F1 that has already impressed with its level of reliability, while waiting to also evaluate its performance in more representative test sessions. On day 3, George Russell and Andrea Kimi Antonelli in fact covered an entire race distance each, also giving themselves the satisfaction (however fleeting) of finishing in the lead of the day ahead of the rest of the group (led by Lando Norris in the McLaren with the number 1 printed on the nose for the first time). Andrew Shovlin’s comment The first days of testing which, in short, gathered the satisfaction of the technical leaders with the engineer Andrew Shovlin who underlined many positive aspects of the Mercedes debut to the microphones of the F1 site at the end of the third day of testing, the second in which the W17 took to the track: “We are happy with the two days out of three that we have completed. We have more or less achieved all our objectives and we have covered the km of more than two races in a single day, so we are happy. The car was going strong at the end, so that was really encouraging. We’re even a little further ahead than we hoped for in terms of mileage, normally you expect to have some initial reliability issues, but the car ran perfectly and the time we’re losing is because of the red flags caused by others.” “Regarding the data collected – continues the English engineer – we are getting there, but given that all the systems are new, there are still some problems that we are solving with data collection and making sure everything is accurate as usual. But, as I said, we had a long list of objectives and, if anything, we are slightly ahead of where we expected to be after two days. The drivers? They are happy with the car, which is more pleasant to drive than the previous rules. It is a little lighter, for they’re already quite good. We have a good balance, both low and high speed. But ultimately, whether they’re happy or not will depend on whether the car is competitive and I think we’ll start to see what they’re capable of maybe on the final day, although realistically, Mercedes will do that job in the Bahrain F1 tests.”