There are two camps in the Mercedes team. The optimists and the pessimists. Andrew Sholvin appears to be in the optimist camp, as the Trackside Engineering Director is confident that the new updates the team is coming out with next week can help his team once again compete with Red Bull.
“We have a good update to take with us, so that’s pretty exciting. We’re also looking forward to the crowd, because a lot of people will support Lewis, but it’s also a track where our car comes into its own. So we still have a few days to regroup, analyze the results and fit the cars with the new bodywork. We are optimistic for the new race weekend,” he said.
However, his positivity is at odds with the words of team boss Toto Wolff and star driver Lewis Hamilton, who do not think the updates will make much of a difference. The team boss still cynically shouted that Mercedes would drive everyone half a minute during the British Grand Prix weekend, but in conversation with Sky Sports he is less enthusiastic.
“We won’t see any major changes. There will be another update in Silverstone, but it’s been in the pipeline for a while,” said Wolff, whose team he says doesn’t need motivation. “Everyone is ready for it. It’s close together. If Bottas had been second in Monte Carlo and Hamilton had benefited from Verstappen’s failure in Baku, the championship would still have been wide open been. So we think the race to race title battle could go the other way.”
His star driver, Hamilton, is a little less optimistic. “We have some updates coming, but that won’t be enough to close the gap to Verstappen. We really have work to do,” he said. RacingNews365 after the first triple header of the season.
“The last races have been difficult and Max can take it easy at the front. I can’t argue with much. I’m grateful to have finished in Austria despite my injury, but it was frustrating to lose second place, but it was It’s good that we were there again.”
On the way to Silverstone, he will not concern himself with Formula 1 at all. “I don’t have to reset, I just have to cut myself off from Formula 1 and do something else,” said the Briton, who was spotted in Paris the day after the triple header, where he was busy with another hobby: fashion.
Finally, Valtteri Bottas seems to be more in the positive camp. He thinks Mercedes can do well at Silverstone. “Red Bull is clearly faster in Austria, but it could be different on other tracks. Silverstone is completely different again, there are a lot more high-speed corners there, so we’ll see. We have some new updates, but after that it’s going to be that I think the front is quiet again. We keep pushing, as hard as we can, but we know it’s going to be tough.”
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