“Desperately disappointing.” There aren’t many Formula 1 squads that would feel this way after securing a season-opener podium. But, as team director of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin tells Autosport, that was precisely Mercedes’ reaction to Lewis Hamilton’s third place in Bahrain, behind the two Ferrari drivers.
To call it a shock would be something of an understatement. F1’s dominant squad, the constructors’ champion for eight straight years, had been humbled, needing both Red Bulls to drop out with fuel-pump failures in order to make the rostrum.
“The damn thing doesn’t work.” This was Hamilton’s response when he drove the now-infamous W13 in Mercedes’ pre-season shakedown at Silverstone four weeks earlier, the seven-time world champion left with “a feeling when I first drove the car” that it was not a regular race winner, let alone a world beater.
That’s an important moment in Mercedes’ 2022 story. It was there that the team first spotted the porpoising issue that would blight its first season running a ground-effects car. But, as Hamilton and new team-mate
