Mercedes’ Andrew Shovlin has offered insight into how the team approached Lewis Hamilton’s race in Azerbaijan.
Hamilton was forced to start from the pitlane as Mercedes opted to fit him with a new power unit in Baku, with the seven-time F1 World Champion thus unable to take his seventh-place grid slot.
Andrew Shovlin explains Mercedes setup changes
Hamilton was able to recover to ninth place during the 51-lap race in Baku, helped into the points by the crash involving Sergio Perez and Carlos Sainz on the penultimate lap.
Having come home a minute behind podium-finishing teammate George Russell, Hamilton wasn’t in a particularly great mood afterward as Wolff tried to commiserate with his driver over team radio over a race of “misery”.
Having made setup changes to his W15 after finding a component hadn’t been working correctly on Saturday, together with his power unit change, the breach of parc fermé conditions resulted in his pitlane start and doomed him to an anonymous race trying to recover.
Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes‘ head of trackside engineering, explained what had been going on with regards to the setup “experiment” that had been done with Hamilton’s car for the race.
“Well, I mean the background is that once you’re out of parc fermé you can make any changes that you want to the specification of the car,” Shovlin explained in the team’s Azerbaijan GP debrief.
“Now, following qualifying, Lewis had struggled with the car, George was finding his setup and his balance to be much better suited to the track at that time.
“So Lewis was able to get together with his engineers, with Bono (race engineer Pete Bonnington), to look at what they might do with the setup to try and evolve it better for the circuit, to try and help the car turn more easily.
“So those changes were then built onto the car for the race. It wasn’t so much that we were putting new or experimental parts, it was more just the opportunity between qualifying and race that you don’t normally get to make a significant setup change and then he was able to see how that performed in the long run on Sunday.”
Why did Mercedes choose to change Lewis Hamilton’s power unit?
“At least we have taken the penalty now. Let’s move forward, look forward,” were Wolff’s words over the team radio to a silent Hamilton after the race.
The change of power unit – a fifth internal combustion engine, turbo, MGU-H, and MGU-K had all been fitted to Hamilton’s car – had forced him to start from the pitlane, and Shovlin explained why the decision had been taken to make the change at this race – why did the team sacrifice his seventh place grid slot?
“The situation with Lewis really starts back in Melbourne when we lost a very young power unit with a failure,” Shovlin said.
“So, we’d been aware for a long time that we were going to have to try and get another power unit into the pool in order to be able to complete the season without risk of one failing during a race which you definitely don’t want that to happen. So the question was where do we do it?
“Now you wouldn’t normally have taken a pit lane start from a P7 grid position because there’d be a decent opportunity to score points but one of the factors for us is we’ve sort of drifted back a bit in terms of our performance recently but, in the near future, we’ve got a good update kit coming.
“We’re hoping that that will put us back into a better situation and what we’d wanted to do was really get the pain of that pit lane start out of the way before we’ve got a car that hopefully can get back to challenging for podiums on merit.
“So that was the real thinking, that’s now behind us so we are looking forward to the rest of the season and, certainly in Lewis’ case, he should have a good, reliable, powerful Mercedes engine for the remaining races.”
