Mercedes Identifies What Slowed Hamilton Down At Start Of 2024 Season

Tuesday, 06 August 2024 at 16:00

The trackside engineering director at Mercedes, Andrew Shovlin, pinpointed the cause behind Lewis Hamilton's lack of performance at the beginning of the 2024 season.

Lewis Hamilton has been on a roll in the last six races. The seven-time World Champion is the only driver who has not finished worse than fourth since the 2024 Canadian Grand Prix.

In that period (six races), he has stood on the podium four times and won two Grand Prix races. However, the 39-year-old has not been in such form since the start of the season.

In fact, many questioned him when his teammate outperformed him in all of the first five races of the season, in which his best finishing position was P7.

How was Hamilton able to turn this around? Or what was so challenging for him in the first couple of races? Andrew Shovlin told the media:

"I think early on, perhaps Lewis was finding the car more difficult to deal with. One of the areas that we've improved with the car is being able to land the setup in FP1."

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"That's a good foundation to start building on performance and fine-tuning it that helps your weekend enormously."

The German team showed some signs of performance even earlier in the season, but they couldn't deliver consistently. Shovlin explained:

"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."

Of course, the team then introduced some upgrades that also improved the car's performance, but the trackside engineering director seems to believe that being able to land the right setup early on was the most important aspect for the seven-time World Champion.

"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."

"I think there's a certain driving style that suits these tires. 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."