The Mercedes F1 team witnessed Blistering of tyres which cost Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas to lose some points and dominance in the race. However, the Silver Arrows managed to reach the victory lane in the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix on Sunday.
Even though the team mentioned that they were nervous about the tyres, they believe that rather than being troubled by it, they prefer such kind of challenges to get the team fired up according to Chief race engineer Andrew Shovlin.
Pirelli's compounds meant higher wear since the tyres were made further soft for the second race of the season at Silverstone but Lewis Hamilton's team suffered what he calls" hardcore" tyre blistering since the carcass overheats which results in the deterioration of tyre surface. This had allowed Max Verstappen of Red Bull to leap forward and win his first race of the season.
Chief race engineer Andrew Shovlin stated, “Right now we haven’t got the answers and I think the way that we approach problems are really interesting… and what we need to do is get excited about getting our heads together and fixing it because, actually, they are really interesting and good, fun problems, when you can get on top of them. [There's] an element of urgency here because we are flying out to Barcelona on Tuesday. "
Also See: Lewis Hamilton: The Tyres Are Like "Balloons"
The tyre compounds in Spain is said to be one step harder that the ones allotted for the 70th Anniversary Grand Prix but the F1 teams expect simlar outcomes witnessed at Silverstone.
Andrew Shovlin mentioned that, “running on Fridays, forecast to be 30 degrees [Celsius], the track will be like this [as it was at Silverstone]. It’s a high energy circuit, so we’re well aware, if we don’t get on top of it, we’ve got another Sunday of looking silly."
“The racing’s great fun but actually the engineering’s great fun as well, and there’s quite a few of us who welcome these challenges as engineers, because it’s a real test of your mettle.”
He further stated that- "We’ve seen Red Bull – they’re not far off us in races even when we’re looking at our best – so to be honest if we don’t make progress we’ll be in trouble there as well, so that’s kind of where this urgency to get a bit of a grip on it comes from. What was news to us was we’re kind of at the very, very worst end of that problem and Red Bull appear to be at the very best end of that spectrum. That’s the thing that we need to understand.”
