Revealed: The ‘innate’ quality Mercedes will miss as Lewis Hamilton departs for Ferrari

Mercedes’ Andrew Shovlin has paid tribute to the qualities Lewis Hamilton brought to the team, ahead of his switch to Ferrari.

The seven-time F1 World Champion provided the bombshell of the off-season coming into 2024 as it was confirmed he would leave his home of over a decade at Mercedes in order to join Ferrari for next season.

Andrew Shovlin: Lewis Hamilton chasing another challenge

With Mercedes coming on strong in 2024 as its upgrades for the W15 have proven effective, it’s returned Lewis Hamilton to the top step of the podium with wins at Silverstone and Spa-Francorchamps.

It’s been a tough route back to the top for the Brackley-based squad, after two years of struggling for pace with a recalcitrant W13 and W14 before finding form again with the W15.

Hamilton made his decision to switch before the W15 had hit the track for pre-season testing and, given the uptick in performance from Mercedes that has coincided with a subdued season from Ferrari, is there the feeling within Brackley that Hamilton could have been convinced to stay had the improvement come sooner?

The team’s head of trackside engineering, Andrew Shovlin, pondered this question when put to him by PlanetF1.com as he spoke to select media at the Belgian Grand Prix.

“I think, if we’d been winning championships, it would have been difficult for Lewis to say no,” he said.

“However, I think his biggest reasons are not necessarily ones of car performance.

“He clearly wants to have another chapter in his career beyond his very successful one with Mercedes.

“He’s of an age where, if he was going to do that, he would need to do it sooner rather than later.

“As I said, if we were dominating the championship, I suspect it would have been difficult for him to do that.

“But I think a big part of Lewis is wanting to have another team and another challenge in his career.

“I think, when someone’s decided that they want to do that, it can be quite difficult to persuade them otherwise.”

With Hamilton winning his first race since the tail end of 2021 as he beat Max Verstappen to victory at Silverstone, Shovlin refuted that the seven-time F1 World Champion is a man reborn due to an increase in confidence, but that both he and Russell have an extra pep in their step due to the improved performance that allows them to fight for wins.

“I wouldn’t say a drastic change,” he said of Hamilton’s performances and demeanour since winning the British Grand Prix.

“The bigger one, with both of the drivers, is they’ve recently realised that, if the tracks right, we’ve got a car that can win races – as we saw in Silverstone – and we’ve got a car that, for the last five races, has been fighting for podiums on merit.

“So that will always sort of get them more excited about the opportunity because drivers do it to win, and to get podiums – that’s what they enjoy.

“I wouldn’t say I’ve seen a great change in Lewis – did the win bring him confidence?

“I think it’s probably a relief for him. It means he’s not asking the question of whether he’ll win again.

“From the whole team’s point of view, we were delighted that he did because the career he’s had with the team is one that would be more aptly finished with a few more trophies rather than a sort of flat kind of finish that we’ve had with the performance we had at the start of the year.”

With just a few short months left of the Hamilton/Mercedes combination – a partnership that became the most successful driver/team pairing in F1’s history – Shovlin, ever the engineer, said that he’ll miss the potent feedback Hamilton has always been able to provide.

“I’ll miss him as a character because he’s good fun to work with,” he said.

“His race pace has been extremely good, but what he brought to the team is an awful lot of speed and a good feel for what the car needs.

“He is very good at highlighting where the weaknesses are in the car.

“But it’s difficult to say what would miss specifically from an engineering point of view – other than he just has this innate feel for what the car’s doing, what the tyres are doing, and that’s very valuable when you feed that into the development process.”

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