Mercedes explain Lewis Hamilton’s W15 ‘experiment’ with

Mercedes’ Andrew Shovlin has offered insight into how the team approached Lewis Hamilton’s race in Azerbaijan.

Hamilton was forced to start from the pitlane as Mercedes opted to fit him with a new power unit in Baku, with the seven-time F1 World Champion thus unable to take his seventh-place grid slot.

Andrew Shovlin explains Mercedes setup changes
Hamilton was able to recover to ninth place during the 51-lap race in Baku, helped into the points by the crash involving Sergio Perez and Carlos Sainz on the penultimate lap.

Having come home a minute behind podium-finishing teammate George Russell, Hamilton wasn’t in a particularly great mood afterward as Wolff tried to commiserate with his driver over team radio over a race of “misery”.

Having made setup changes to his W15 after finding a component hadn’t been working correctly on Saturday, together with his power unit change, the breach of parc fermé conditions resulted in his pitlane start and doomed him to an anonymous race trying to recover.

Andrew Shovlin, Mercedes‘ head of trackside engineering, explained what had been going on with regards to the setup “experiment” that had been done with Hamilton’s car for the race.

Well, I mean the background is that once you’re out of parc fermé you can make any changes that you want to the specification of the car,” Shovlin explained in the team’s Azerbaijan GP debrief.

“Now, following qualifying, Lewis had struggled with the car, George was finding his setup and his balance to be much better suited to the track at that time.