Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin has pinpointed the team’s ability to “land the setup in FP1” as a key reason for Lewis Hamilton’s improved form in F1 2024.
Even though Mercedes were a clear fourth-best in the first part of the year, Hamilton was consistently out-performed by Mercedes teammate George Russell.
In the last eight races, Hamilton has scored 123 points – only Max Verstappen (141) and Oscar Piastri (126) have scored more.
During this time, Hamilton has added two more wins to his CV, bringing an end to his win drought which stretched back to the 2021 Saudi Arabian Grand Prix.
Shovlin believes Mercedes’ progress with the setup of the car has been crucial in Hamilton’s return to form.
“I think early on perhaps Lewis was finding the car more difficult to deal with,” Shovlin said at the Belgian GP, where Crash.net were present. “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.”
Pirelli’s tyres are also at the heart of performance in F1 – and getting them into the right window is crucial to finding lap time.
“I think there’s a certain driving style that suits these tyres,” he added. “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.”
