Shovlin hopeful: Our race pace has normally been good

After Mercedes suffered a Q2 exit at Imola, Andy Shovlin is hoping for a better showing in Saturday afternoon’s sprint race.

Neither George Russell nor Lewis Hamilton had the pace to make it out of Q2 in qualifying for the Emilia Romagna Grand Prix with Hamilton only sneaking through into Q2 by 0.004s.

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It was a difficult Friday for the Brackley squad, the team failing to make it into the final pole position shoot-out for the first time since the 2012 Japanese Grand Prix.

But all is not lost insists Shovlin.

“Our race pace has normally been good,” said the Mercedes trackside engineer director after qualifying. “We’ve demonstrated that we’re third quickest on race pace.

“The problem is on a single lap, we seem to be very much in the midfield. It’s an area that we’re working on, but we don’t yet fully understand.”

Sebastian Vettel

Mercedes

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Part of that problem is that the W13 struggles to get heat into its tyres.

“We’ve struggled with tyre warm up with this car to be honest, we’ve not got to the bottom of it,” Shovlin explained.

“Today was a painful example of that, where we couldn’t get the runs in that were long enough to build temperature to get the cars into the right window.

“