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Tech Talk: Andrew Shovlin on W15's Development and Progress

With F1 paused for the annual summer shutdown, we caught up with Trackside Engineering Director Andrew Shovlin to get his thoughts on the first half of the year, the development of W15 and what's to come in the future.

We're already past the halfway point of the 2024 F1 season and what a journey it's been since the first race in Bahrain.

Early on-track struggles as we aimed to find the right balance with W15, have given way to considerable progress.

Incredible work from the teams at Brackley and Brixworth helped deliver developments and upgrades as we began to unlock some of W15's potential.

Three wins in the past four races, six podiums in a row and plenty of points accrued have changed the complexion of the season.

Early Season Performance

So, what does Shov think of the first half of the year?

"The main thing is progress," he says.

"Where we were in the early races in Bahrain and in Jeddah, it was difficult to look at the car and understand what it was you had to do to make it quick.

"We could see it had certain strengths, but it also had plenty of weaknesses.

"Now, the team has responded brilliantly to that challenge. We know where we want to get to in terms of performance level.

"We knew that we wanted to be winning races, and we set ourselves a target of by the end of the season, we wanted to be qualifying on pole and winning races."

Adapting and Overcoming Challenges

Hard work, dedication, and some exceptional driving has helped bring that success to the team, but the journey of 2024 has been a continuous one.

For the Shov, part of the challenge of this year was bringing developments to the car earlier than scheduled.

"We didn't really bring developments to the early races of the year. We were focused on understanding the platform we had and ensuring we could unlock performance consistently. "Once that work was done, we had a clear path ahead. So, we started to pull forward developments with a new floor in Miami," he says.

"We then pulled forward a front wing that was due later in the season. We had one on George's car in Monaco.

"By that point you could see that we had a car that was definitely one that you could work with and improve around that time of Monaco.

"What we have seen since then is a pretty impressive delivery of updates to every single track.

"As you solve problems with the handling of the car, the challenge actually becomes simple and you get more clarity about what you want to do next.

"In the early part of the year we had a car that its behaviour would be changed wildly with relatively small swings in track condition. In Jeddah we were bouncing badly in the high-speed corners.

"It's quite hard to unpick all those issues.

"If you look at tracks like Budapest, you'd say we're still putting too much temperature in the rear tyres and there's also just an element that we need to find a bit more base performance. "The problems we're dealing with as the car has gotten quicker have also become more easy to see."

Progress Made but Where Could the Car be Improved?

The team is full of confidence and there has been clear progress made with the car. There is always more performance to be found and more to do if we want to continue reducing the gap to the teams at the very front.

"The remaining weaknesses in hot conditions are the rear-limited circuits," Shov says. "We're not as good as the McLarens or Max [Verstappen].

"We saw that in Budapest, and we saw that in Austria. Our gap on race pace in Budapest was smaller so we made progress there over the sequence of these recent races. If you looked at Silverstone, we were competitive."

"Everyone is trying to develop their cars. If you're not developing, at a faster rate than the others then you are going backwards.

"We can only see a month or six weeks into the future because that's the horizon we're working with in the wind tunnel.

"Are they going to continue to be able to bring performance into the latter part of the year? Hopefully. We've got good ideas but there's a lot of work to go through between having an idea and actually getting physical parts that you can put on the car and make it go quicker."

2024 Standings

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