Mercedes get Red Bull ‘ideas’ after secret snaps as Hamilton hunts Verstappen

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Mercedes have admitted they will get ‘ideas’ about how Red Bull’s car works after a gift at the Monaco Grand Prix. It comes after photographers snapped details of the RB19 at the Monaco Grand Prix after Sergio Perez’s crash in qualifying.

Marshals were forced to crane the car off the circuit which allowed rivals to study the underside of the machine which is rarely seen on race weekends. However, Andrew Shovlin feels the team will still be unable to capitalise as it would be difficult to directly steal the team’s concepts.

He said: “All teams will be looking at the photos. I suspect they will be looking a bit more at the Red Bull ones than the Mercedes or the Ferrari ones. You can certainly get ideas about what they are trying to do with flow structures, where they might be going with the development direction. If you look at last year, you look at this year, you can understand a bit about what they are doing there.

“The reality is while those pictures can give you a bit of inspiration or an idea it’s not as simple as ‘let’s copy that and put it on our car and we will be as quick as they are’. It’s definitely not a case of that.

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“The reality is you’ve got to focus a vast amount of your effort on understanding your own car and developing from there. I think a little bit of inspiration but not much more than that.” Ahead of the weekend, technical director James Allison confirmed the Silver Arrows would hold an investigation to study the photographs.

He revealed the team now had a “nice clutch of Red Bull imagery” with the team’s aerodynamicist set to “pore over” the details. Allison admitted any key details could even be run in future test programmes.

However, Martin Brundle shared Shovlin’s concerns, warning that it would be difficult to get the system working with Mercedes’ current design.

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Brundle told Sky Sports F1: “I’m sure most teams would have seen the floors in transit being taken off the car. People move around teams so they will have quite a lot of information.

“But what Andrew Shovlin is saying there, the upper surfaces work with the lower surfaces and how you present the whole car to the racetrack with the suspension controlling it while still being able to go over bumps. It’s a great big complex situation.

“They’ll be able to just scale that and make an exact Red Bull floor if they wanted but it wouldn’t work with their upper surfaces. There’s no doubt about it, teams would have taken those images and will be working hard on them.”

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