Mercedes’ four-race timeline could concern Red Bull in quest for F1 greatness :

Andrew Shovlin is confident the next four circuits will suit the Mercedes car as they look to return to the top of the F1 grid.

By the time of lights out in Austria, it will have been 231 days since Mercedes last tasted F1 victory and 574 days since they last won consecutive races and while that is unlikely to change in Spielberg, Mercedes have been on an upwards trajectory.

Their vast upgrade package came good in Spain and Lewis Hamilton followed up that initial success with another podium in Canada but in Montreal, the W14 still appeared to lack pace behind Aston Martin.

Red Bull is another step further with the Milton Keynes team having so far won every race in 2023 but trackside engineering director Shovlin believes the next four grands prix will play into Mercedes’ hands.

Speaking ahead of trips to Austria, Britain, Hungary and Belgium, Shovlin was pleased the gap in Canada was “not too frightening.”

“It would be nice to have had both cars in it to the end because I think Fernando was a bit quicker but with George [Russell] there we could have maybe done something on the strategy dragging him in,” Shovlin told F1 Nation. “But you know the main thing is we’ve been encouraged by the pace of the car.

“There were a lot of reasons that we were thinking this would be a difficult circuit but the gaps are not too frightening at this track and we’re hoping that at the four circuits coming up, we’ll have a car that’s working a lot better.”

Red Bull are attempting to do something that has never been done before and that is win every race in a season. Right now, it looks like Mercedes are the most realistic team to stop them doing that.

Shovlin believes having two consistently performing drivers is what makes Mercedes a force this season.

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“I think [Austria’s] one of the circuits that we seem a bit better at with these new regulations,” he said. “We always struggled a bit with the warp corners.

“But if we look at what we’ve done in terms of updating the car, we’ll gain more at the faster corners and there’s a bit of that in Austria,

“But the other thing is we’ve got two drivers who seem to be delivering week in, week out in qualifying which, compared to the teams that were racing, they’ve not been so consistent at getting them both to perform.”