Mercedes feeling "tough" F1 triple-header

Mercedes trackside engineering director Andrew Shovlin has revealed "everyone is feeling it" after F1's latest triple-header.

Triple-headers have become common-place in F1 over the past two years as the sport has battled against the pandemic to complete a full calendar.

The Italian Grand Prix brought a close to the second triple-header of the season, with the most brutal yet to come as a TBC race expected to be Qatar follows Mexico and Brazil.

Assessing the impact of the latest 'three in a row', Shovlin said: “There is no doubt that triple headers are tough.

"You are preparing for one race, then you are doing it, then you are trying to do the work following up from that race while preparing for the next one.

"In effect, we are working over 20 days in a row without a day off. Everyone is feeling that a bit.

"The other thing is it doesn’t all finish on Sunday evening. We've got another four, five days in the office here looking at the learnings from those three races.

"We've got a list of problems that we need to get stuck into, areas we can improve, possibilities for development, so those are all pretty busy areas and then also we've got to look ahead to that next race in Russia."

McLaren has led calls for F1 to "completely avoid" triple-headers in its 2022 calendar with Haas team principal Guenther Steiner agreeing F1 should steer clear of such a tough schedule..

The recent reshuffling of the calendar, with Singapore and Japan dropping off the calendar, has opened up the coming weeks favourably, with races in Russia, Turkey and the United States all acting as standalone events.

Shovlin added: "It is pretty much nonstop but nice to get to the back of that triple and we are looking forward to the next three single header events where there is a bit more time to recover in between."

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