Mercedes hints at structural problems W11: "Just a question of how soon"

Last weekend in Austria Mercedes suffered from sensor malfunctions and the gearbox also threatened to fail due to the heavy vibrations on the Red Bull Ring. According to the world champion, these are problems that cannot be solved quickly in the run-up to the next Grands Prix in 2020.

“On Friday you saw that Valtteri had an issue at the end of one of the sessions so that was first a sign that we had a problem", Shovlin begins to tell F1 Nation podcast. The Trackside Engineering Director argues that the problems never disappeared after that. "We’ve had recurrend issues over the course of Saturday and going into the race we were expecting it because it seems to be a feature of the model."

The Mercedes top man continues his story by saying that it is a structural problem. "So, at the moment if we build the car and run it this problem will appear at some point – it’s just a question of how soon", he says. "

Mercedes systems

It's not easy for the Brackley based race stable to solve the problem of one day to the next. "It’s not manifesting itself as one thing, no they are related it’s basically a build-up of electrical noise that starts to interfere with the various systems so with Valtteri we saw that halfway through the race, got progressively worse, with Lewis it appeared later. But it’s electrical noise that’s then affecting a lot of different things", Shovlin concluded.