Mercedes reveals: 'We're going after Max Verstappen again!

Mercedes has not succeeded in enticing Max Verstappen to switch to the German stable, but the team certainly has not forgotten him. In fact, the focus remains on Verstappen for the remaining months, as indicated by the words of Andrew Shovlin, the trackside engineering director of Mercedes.

Not to attract Verstappen after all, but rather to beat him. A foremost focus of Mercedes is to capture the third place in the world championship by George Russell. The Brit currently has a deficit of fifteen points on Verstappen. 

''We've got George looking in a pretty close battle with Max for P3 in the Drivers' Championship,'' Shovlin says in Mercedes' Race Debrief.

The Brit expects a lot from the rest of the season: ''With Kimi, we've seen some excellent race pace. And the focus with him will be making sure we can start him further up the grid, because if we do that, he will just be converting that to a lot of points.''

In the constructor's championship, McLaren is out of reach, but Mercedes sees itself ending up behind: ''We're in a pretty tight battle for second in the Constructors' Championship. So Ferrari just a little bit ahead, Red Bull behind. So that's going to be fun.''

Mercedes won once this season, in Canada. There could be more victories, thinks Shovlin. "Hopefully, there'll be an opportunity to build on our tally of race wins. So we had a great time in Montreal. There's other circuits that are a bit more like that coming up over the remaining 10 races. And hopefully, we'll have a few more highlights.''

With an excellent third place behind the indomitable McLarens in the Hungarian Grand Prix, Mercedes showed that they have located and solved the problems of the past few months, in contrast to Red Bull Racing, which had no idea how to find the right setup for the RB21 at the Hungaroring.