“We did hundreds of thousands of simulations”: Mercedes trackside engineer reveals the secret behind emphatic win of Lewis Hamilton in Brazil

Andrew Shovlin says that Mercedes performed ‘hundreds of thousands’ of simulations that contributed to victory of Lewis Hamilton in Sao Paolo.

Hamilton was at his vintage best during the Sao Paolo GP. Despite being disqualified from Friday’s qualifying session due to a DRS infringement and taking a grid penalty due to an engine change, the Briton finished 1st in the race on Sunday.

He started 1oth for the main race but convincingly outpaced title rival Max Verstappen to take his 6th win of the season. The Mercedes driver is now just 14 points behind Verstappen with three races to go.

Mercedes’ trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin was asked if the team felt confident ahead of the race. He replied by saying, “We do a lot of simulations. It is in the hundreds of thousands or more.”

“I mean, before that, we weren’t delighted with the ruling on the rear wing, but we did have a question of ‘Do we fight this? Do we try and appeal it? Are we going to race under appeal?’

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The car definitely had the pace to overtake others, says Shovlin

The Silver Arrows showed a strong pace all weekend long. They were the fastest car in the practice session on Friday, and Hamilton took pole position in the qualifying session comfortably before his disqualification. This is why the team was confident that they had what it took to win on Sunday.

“But it was pretty evident from the runs that we had seen on Friday, from where we had been able to qualify, that we actually had a good car and we had a lot of opportunities to recover that.” said Shovlin.

“It was a relatively short conversation, not that we had long to make that conversation but a relatively short conversation where we just decided to get on with it and try and take the penalty and see what we could do to minimize the impact of it.”

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Shovlin lauds a phenomenal Lewis Hamilton drive

Hamilton’s performance in the Sprint race was just a preview of what would come on Sunday. He started from 20th to finish 5th. All the positions gained were due to overtakes and not incidents involving other drivers.

“Probably the thing that set our hopes of having a minimum of a podium and a possible win was just the performance in the sprint race because, in that, we saw Lewis could attack practically anyone out there,” said the Mercedes engineer.

“We saw that we had a good pace advantage, but as I said, importantly, we could sit behind a car, do a good turn 12, we had good traction, and those are the ingredients you need to overtake here.

“We were hopeful, but you don’t know whether that is going to be the case so it was encouraging when you saw that we were strong come race day.”