According to Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes was aided in overcoming its challenging start to the 2022 Formula 1 season by a philosophy of never getting overconfident in its prior success.
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Mercedes had a run of eight straight constructors’ championship victories until 2014, when the new W13, which had performance issues and porpoised, put the team on the back foot. The beginning of the year was particularly challenging because the team wasted weeks of development time attempting to figure out what went wrong with its design. Mercedes ultimately took control of the situation in the final stretch of the campaign to win the Brazilian Grand Prix after a number of false starts in which it had seemed to find the solutions before slipping back again.
The season was not always enjoyable, according to Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Shovlin, despite the spectacular turnaround. He believes, though, that an attitude ingrained in it during the heydays was crucial in enabling it to buckle down when things didn’t go as planned. It’s challenging to reflect on the year and feel extremely content. It’s been difficult,” he stated. “But I believe that the team’s culture helped us succeed, and we never let our own success go to our heads. “After years of going to every race with the hope of starting on pole and winning, we were pretty quick to adjust to the reality that we were now racing in the middle of the grid. And I believe we handled that situation nicely.
While dealing with the issues wasn’t enjoyable, Shovlin thinks that going to such lengths to figure out what worked with the new ground effect cars would offer it an advantage in the future. In actuality, he claimed, “we spent three months doing very little development and it was all about studying and knowing what we needed to accomplish.” “We were providing updates and running everything we had created during the final races. Thus, I believe it probably did assist us.
“I believe that if we had the option to select between the two, we would have always opted to deal with it by rolling out with the race winner. In all honesty though, I believe the team has had a successful year. “We were aware that you can’t always win. And we were aware that there will always be years like this. The test was always, “Well, how are we doing when we get that year?. So I feel like that was intriguing. We have gained a lot of knowledge. Next year will reveal whether we utilised it to its full potential.
