F1 News: Mercedes Engineering Director Rejects Lewis Hamilton's W14 Opinions

Andrew Shovlin of Mercedes F1 team has responded to Hamilton's criticism of the W14 upgrades, saying that the reason for his crash was his overdriving.

After the Imola Grand Prix was cancelled due to horrific weather conditions, Mercedes rolled out their much-awaited W14 upgrades for the famous Monaco Grand Prix. This was met with optimism, as both drivers of the Brackley squad reported a "good feeling" after the improvements. Lewis Hamilton specifically was glad to see the back of the zero-pod design. But with him still critical of the car, Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin has rejected his feedback.

Entering the Grand Prix, Mercedes wasn't overly confident they could extract the performance they expected from these upgrades on the tight and treacherous track. However, Hamilton quickly demonstrated his prowess by showing excellent results during the initial practice, finishing third fastest in FP1. 

His momentum was cut short due to a crash in FP3, later landing P6 in the qualifying. Despite acknowledging some improvement in the car, Hamilton confessed he couldn't fully trust its performance yet.

Shovlin, talking to the F1 Nation podcast, rejected his reaction:

 “Well, you don’t get temperature by overdriving and sliding – you get the temperature, but the wrong temperature.

"You don’t want it on the surface because we know that the Italian product is quite temperamental on surface temperature, so, you need to build the core temperature, very specifically,"he said referencing the Pirellis. 

He continued: 

“That’s art and science no one has fully mastered, but this sliding itself is not good.

"Overdriving is not really the way forward, but if they said that they are doing that, it’s perhaps now old-school singing quite a good sign because they feel comfortable and able to do it.

"So that means that the way the car goes in is progressive, it is user friendly and then perhaps on that, they could build up more performance and more trust in the car.”

Hamilton's performance in the past two years can help gauge the extent of their progress. Both times, he qualified sixth, but this year he was only three-tenths off the pole - an improvement, albeit minor. He finished P4 after a difficult race for seemingly all drivers but Max Verstappen, Fernando Alonso, and Esteban Ocon. 

“I’m really happy," Hamilton said surprisingly. "We moved forwards and, coming into the weekend, I didn’t know where we would stand. 

"So to come out fourth and fifth, it was really great points for the team. It’s a huge thank you to everyone back at the factory for pushing and bringing those upgrades. 

"There’s so much work to bring those here and we kept in one piece and we brought it home. We beat the Ferraris, we really got some good points today as a team.”

Last Monday marked the beginning of another race week - hooray! - and while Mercedes will be cautious about putting faith in their new upgrades, they'll be optimistic about the data they'll be able to extract. With the Spanish Grand Prix being a former test track for the sport, the squad will know precisely how to analyse and learn from the W14 changes. 

“Next week, Barcelona is the best test bench circuit for us," Hamilton said. "It was really difficult here to really know.

"The car feels very stiff, there’s a lot of bumps–it’s tricky.”