Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team‘s chief race engineer, Andrew Shovlin, has said that seven-time World Champion Lewis Hamilton is deserving of all the success he has had in his career, winning at the Turkish Grand Prix last weekend, starting the race from sixth position.
Shovlin said that this weekend proved why Hamilton has enjoyed all the success that he has had during his career in Formula 1.
“We didn’t need a reminder as to why Lewis deserves to be a seven-time champion today, but he gave us one anyway. He deserves every bit of success that he has had, and it was a privilege to see him celebrate that championship on the top step of the podium. The race itself was pretty unpredictable. We were able to make some changes to the car with the rules around ‘change of climatic conditions’ and for the first time this weekend managed to get the tyres working,” he said.
He added that the team as a whole had a difficult start, putting them on the back foot for part of the grand prix.
“The opening laps were clearly quite tricky, and it was surprisingly hard to get close to anyone to pass, especially when we didn’t have DRS. Valtteri had a good start but spun trying to avoid a Renault at turn one and then had contact later at turn 9 causing some damage that compromised his car for the race. Lewis also had a good start but ran a bit long into turn 9 and lost a couple places which made his day more difficult as he spent a long time stuck behind Seb.”
He continued saying that their decisions on strategy were made much easier due to the weather conditions, and the most significant question they had to answer was for how long they could make the Intermediate tyres work.
“The strategy ended up being more straight forward than we’d expected, the biggest point of discussion on the pit wall was how far we could go on a set of inters and we didn’t really know the answer to that as we’ve gone that far before. Lewis did a great job of looking after the tyres and managed that stint well avoiding the need for an extra stop. We’ve still got three races to go and are looking forward to some warm weather in the Middle East and hopefully finishing this season with some strong results.”
