Mercedes says replicating its performance from Austin where it endured a race-long duel with Red Bull will be the “best case scenario” for the Mexican Grand Prix.
The Circuit of the Americas was expected to favour Mercedes given its recent form, but Red Bull took a shock pole position before converting that into a race win.
While Mercedes still heads the constructors’ standings despite its defeat in the United States, Lewis Hamilton slipped further behind Max Verstappen in the title race, with the gap extending to 12 points.
Mexico’s high altitude has historically favoured Red Bull in recent years, although Mercedes were victorious in Formula 1’s last visit in 2019.
Verstappen won from the front row in both the 2017 and 2018 editions, and would have started from pole the following year had it not been for a penalty.
Having lost out to Red Bull on strategy in Austin, Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin believes fighting its rivals for victory again would be the best outcome it can hope for.
“There’s a lot to do,” Shovlin said, as quoted by The Race. “It’s such a different circuit and it’s such a different environment for the power unit to operate in but there haven’t been many circuits where we have been far off the pace.
“We’ve struggled in Monaco. We were struggling in Baku. We struggled a bit in that second Austria, but there are more of them where we can challenge them and we can challenge them for pole.
“We know where we’ve struggled in the past. We know what we need to be working on and that’s what we’ll get stuck into.”
The result in Austin brought an end to Mercedes’ recent pace advantage as seen in Monza, Russia and Turkey – where it won two of the three rounds.
Shovlin acknowledged it was “the toughest one we’ve had for a long time”, but felt there were many positives to take ahead of the final five races.
“I don’t think that was a comfortable win for them and we were forcing them to take some risks,” said Shovlin.
“And if that’s a bad race for us then hopefully if we can have more of the good ones we’ve seen, it puts us in a decent position.
“The encouraging thing was we could still put them under pressure when we clearly didn’t have the best car.”
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