Following a dip in form, the team has loaded his programme with mileage to rebuild confidence

Andrea Kimi Antonelli, Mercedes

Photo by: Mark Sutton / Formula 1 via Getty Images

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin has confirmed Kimi Antonelli will be given more time to settle into the championship after a difficult run of races was capped by an ‘underwhelming’ Italian Grand Prix. As the pressure seemingly mounts on the young rookie, the Brackley outfit will do what it can to support him further.

A suspension change implemented earlier in the season hurt the driveability of the W16 – something that Shovlin believes may have confused the young Italian and has now been pulled.

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“We’re confident [the suspension change] was making the car difficult to drive and it was adding performance at very specific circuits like Montreal, but it was causing more problems than it solved at tracks like Austria, Silverstone.”

He added: “So that’s definitely something that will have helped both drivers. It was certainly confusing for Kimi and as a young driver, it’s difficult.”

After starting the season on a high, the same level of performance has been difficult to replicate later in the year as the field has compressed and the cost of even small errors increased.

“Qualifying is a pretty cruel and unforgiving session these days,” Shovlin said, adding that the all-important practice time has been cut short by mistakes.

“And then there were a couple of mistakes where he lost free practice time having ended up in gravel traps,” he continued.

“We just need to work with him to sort of try and get back to that level of comfort that he had in the car,” he said. With the bar high within the Silver Arrows, the pressure is real: “There’s a lot more pressure when it’s difficult to get out of Q1 even, very difficult to get out of Q2, and then you’ve got to have tyres left for Q3.”

The Briton re-emphasised that it’s still a team’s responsibility to support the driver, especially after a difficult lead-up to Zandvoort compromised the driver’s preparation before beaching his car in FP1, further compounded a difficult start to the weekend.

“With Zandvoort, he came in for a simulator session and we had some issues that meant he wasn’t really able to do the prep there. He then makes a mistake in FP1.

“I think we need to own a bit of that responsibility and that we couldn’t do the normal prep.” To reset, Mercedes loaded up the rookie’s run plan before Baku: “He was with us last week and did a very big day – doing two or three race distances or equivalent mileage of that, preparing here.”

Despite a wobble, Mercedes has total faith in its rookie.

“He’s shown us enough in the early part of the season to confirm our expectations that he had the talent to be in F1 and be with Mercedes,” said Shovlin.

“We’ve upped the amount of preparation that we’re doing. Recently – we’re trying different things in terms of getting ready for the race weekends, going into these remaining races,” he continued, adding the commitment to keep iterating until it sticks: “And we’ll just keep reviewing until we get it right.”

Additional reporting by Ronald Vording.

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