Shovlin: “We’ve been working on this engine for years. The W17 is a monumental project”

F1 test, Mercedes ready After the controversies of the winter, the track finally speaks. The F1 tests that will start tomorrow in Bahrain will begin to say something concrete about the hierarchies of the projects that the teams have prepared for 2026: Mercedes gets there better than anyone, at least from a mileage point of view. In fact, no team in the Montmeló shakedown accumulated so many laps (500 were brought home by George Russell and Kimi Antonelli), and therefore the optimism at Brackley is justified. Although the kilometers already covered do not automatically give the lap time, and even if the race for developments will be a central theme from the start, starting well represents a fundamental basis. Mercedes is convinced that it has done so, net of the well-known controversy linked to the power unit and the compression ratio, admitted by the FIA ​​itself. Shovlin’s words “It was an absolutely monumental project and, as far as the engine was concerned, Brixworth had been working on it for years: a very difficult and demanding programme,” commented Mercedes track engineering director Andrew Shovlin. “Added to this is all the complexity of fuel development with Petronas and, on the chassis side, a completely new set of regulations. It’s the biggest project we’ve ever done as a team.” “We don’t know where we are in terms of performance, but we are able to keep the car on the track, which is great because hopefully we can learn quickly. We have achieved almost all the objectives so far. In Bahrain we will focus more on finding the set-up, trying to understand how to get the car into the right window: in Barcelona it was so cold that we had no relevant data for any circuit,” he added. “Bahrain will be a much more suitable place to check that the car works well at room temperature, both in terms of chassis performance and the effectiveness of the systems. Ultimately we will focus more on preparing for the race weekend and all the situations that arise from it.”