Mercedes suffered its fourth defeat to Red Bull in as many races at the first of two races in A🌞ustria as Max Verstappen dominated to claim a commanding vict𝓰ory ahead of title rival Lewis Hamilton.

Speaking after the race, Mercedes head of trackside engineering Andrew Shovlin revealed that the team had explored a “fairly wacky” set-up approach that could have exacerbated its tyre degradation issues and explained the performance drop o꧂ff compared to Red Bull. 

“We’ve had difficulties here before but often they’ve been because we’ve had insufficient cooling or last year we had an electrical loom that was degrading with vibration,” Shovlin said. “So they’re🤡 often not related to performance.

“It is a difficult and quite peculiar circuit and Red Bull are normally strong here. But we’re also exploring a fairly wacky direction with the set-up as a radical꧑ approach, which I thi🌸nk was maybe a bit better on the single lap.

“The question that remains is whether we’ve hurt our degradation and we need to look at that in the next♕ day or two.”

Shovlin explained that Hamilton spent time in the Mercedes simulator following the French Grand Prix to test out what he described as being “brave and original” set-uဣp avenues.

“Essentially t𒀰he window that we work in wa🐼s much, much wider,” he added. “We were sort of going further than we’ve ever gone and just really understanding the effects of that.

“Lewis, before he came here, was doing a lot of work in thꦕe driver-in-loop simulator and it looked like an int⛦eresting direction.

"An important✱ part of this year for us is adapting well to every track and we do need to be a bit brave and original with set-up direction to do t👍hat.”

With Pirelli moving a step softer with its tyre range for this weekend’s Austrian Grand Prix, Mercedes’ mai♔n focus in the short turnaround between events is trying to understanding exactly what impa🤡ct the new set-up direction had on its rear tyres.

“The one big area is understanding this set-up depart🦩ure that we’ve taken and w🅰hether or not that has made life more difficult for the rear tyres in the long run,” Shovlin said.

“Some of that we can just do by data. But we’ll see whether or not there’s work that’s going to carry into ꦦthe Friday of the r🌟ace weekend.

“Fundamentally, the car’s very similar but there are additional challenges of extracting t♋he grip out of that C5 compound, the very softest rubber on the single lap. That might be quite challenging if it is very hot here.

“We’re not looking for massive margins,” he added. “We were down by a couple of tenths in the race and ther𓃲e’s a bit of degradation. But the solution to both of those problems might be the same thing.

“We’ll just try and get the rears running a bit cooler and look after the rubber a bit better and you may find that both of those things come 🔥our way. So we will focus on those areas and it’ll just be a case of seeing if we can come back a bit stronger in a f🗹ew days’ time.”