Mercedes can outdevelop its rivals for second place in the Formula 1 constructors’ championship and pull clear, but will try to learn from McLaren’s recent update package, according to technical director James Allison.
McLaren joined the fight for best of the rest behind Red Bull at Silverstone, with a major upgrade propelling the team to second and third in qualifying, and second and fourth in the race. The pecking order has been fluctuating heavily between Mercedes, Aston Martin and Ferrari already this season and Allison says there is still the potential for Mercedes to make a similarly significant step forward to be consistently second fastest on all tracks.
“We are only just round about halfway through the season and there is plenty more development to come in these cars,” Allison noted. “All of the teams will of course be turning their attention to next year and that will defang all of us a little bit in terms of the rate of which we can improve our cars.
“There are absolutely improvements that we would like to make on our current car that we know will also carry into next year. So it doesn’t feel like throwing good money after bad. The feeling is that you are investing in both seasons with those upgrades. For us yes, you will see the upgrades coming for a little while longer. I suspect for the others too.
“What you will get in this next sequence of races is a little bit of yo-yoing for position in a very closely packed bunch as upgrades make the difference for one team for a while, until someone else will come out of sequence with another upgrade a race or two later to even things back out. Where it will all settle down for the final quarter to one third of a season, we will see. Hopefully we will have our noses in front and be able to have a strong second half of the season.”
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Allison admits that McLaren’s progress impressed Mercedes as it delivered a clear step forward in raw lap time, even if track and weather characteristics were also favorable to Andrea Stella’s team over the past two races.
“We keep an eye on all the teams as they upgrade. We take lots of photos and we try and figure out what changes from race to race. We note when something new or unusual comes along. The interesting and unusual thing about the McLaren upgrade is that its lap time effect is quite strong. It’s unusual to have a step of that size of relative competitiveness in the middle of a season and chapeau to them.
“They’ve done a good piece of work there, but that also makes it interesting for us because we have the before and after shots and we know the lap time effect was big. So it’s well worth us paying more attention than we normally might to another competitor team’s upgrade because in this case, we know that whatever changed has made a meaningful difference to their lap time. It’s quite useful for us to know what that was and see whether it can play into our own thoughts of developing our own car.”